First Contact
by Yaesephir
Summary: AU story with Femshep as main character. What would the universe look like if mankind met a council-race before they found the Prothean ruins on mars? (Adjusted time-line to allow certain characters to exist)
1. Encounter of the improbable kind

**Mass Effect – First Contact**

**Chapter 1: Encounter of the improbable kind.**

_Author's notes:_

_Hi everyone, Yaesephir here._

_For those of you who usually skip AN's, a short collection of [TAG]'s which are a fast and easy way to describe the story:_

_[AU] [Changed timeline] [May contain spoilers] [Slow pace] [Femshep] [Romance as subplot] [Politics] [No Reapers]_

_If you read this story and think that I should add a tag to 'warn' people about certain things, just say so in a review or PM._

_So I finally managed to sit down and start writing a fanfic. Took long enough._

_It's a first for me, not only a writing a Mass Effect fan fiction, but writing a fan fiction in general – and not in my mother tongue on top of that. This FF will be heavily non-canon with some out-of-character personalities for some people, whenever I think it is beneficial for the story._

_You should have finished the original ME series, not only to be safe from spoilers, but also to notice everything that changed compared to the original (which shouldn't be that hard). The rating for this story is T and will maybe change to M, depending on how explicit I'll describe some scenes. IF I decide to change the rating to M it is most likely due to realistic depiction of violence in a war-scenario, not due to sexual themes._

_The story takes place in the near future (201X – 202X, originally I said 2016, but that was a bit too soon, so I decided to change it) but on a different timeline (e.g. the morning war still was 300 years ago, stuff like that) and will include timeskips at some point._

_Last but not least: I would really appreciate reviews and/or personal messages that help me to improve my story – you may be as honest and brutal as you want, I can take it._

_Disclaimer: I do not own the Mass Effect series. I will not repeat this disclaimer because I think it's unnecessary._

* * *

There were some things in life that are so extremely improbable, that no-one would believe you if you told them about it: Like throwing tails twenty times in a row, or never having hit your small toe on a piece of furniture in your house – sure, stuff like that happens sometimes, but not very often. That's why they are so hard to believe.

But humans are weird creatures: if something becomes so extremely unlikely, because statistical probability would suggest that it's more or less impossible, people start to accept things fairly easy.

When a person tells you that he was struck by a lightning-bolt, people will believe him – if he isn't known for being a pathological liar.

So when a large vessel crashed into Shepard's front yard and some bipedal creatures in weird suits stumbled out of the wreck, Johanna Shepard didn't have a hard time believing that those things were not from earth, and that she had just encountered extraterrestrial life – even if it was far more likely that someone was pulling a prank on her for candid camera, or that she was simply hallucinating.

Shepard didn't hesitate and moved towards the UFO – happy that the stories of flying saucers were right and wrong at the same time (right about them existing, wrong about them being saucer-shaped) she went to one of the apparently wounded creatures and lifted it up, to support it in walking.

Johanna could feel the creature tensing up within its suit, it was probably nervous on what was going to happen to it (at this point Shepard noticed that she was far more relaxed than she should be in this situation). Deciding that it would probably help to show the thing (Johanna was still struggling on coming up with a name for the creature she had encountered) that she meant no harm, she started talking to it in a slow and soft voice. She knew that the being wouldn't be able to understand her, but that wasn't the point in the first place – the main goal was to show that she (and humans in general) were a species capable of empathy.

She could feel the sentient starting to calm down as they slowly approached the front door of Shepard's home.

Johanna couldn't help but wonder about the suit the creature was wearing. It looked like a really slim fitting suit like seen in various science fiction movies, combined with a gas mask or respirator with full face window made from tinted glass. The back of the head was covered by a hood, which seemed to have no special purpose. The mask and slim suit she could understand, as the atmosphere on earth could differ heavily from the atmosphere of the planet this species was from.

After a short moment she concluded that the species was most likely highly advanced, and that space-travel might not be as expensive anymore, so that there was a market for casual space-clothing. Or that it had a religious/cultural meaning.

In the end it didn't matter right now – after helping the space-traveler into the living room and on the couch Johanna once more spoke to him (or her – she wasn't even sure if this species had genders just like humans did) and turned to the door to check out the other survivors. When she stepped out of the entrance she saw three other members of this race crawling around the shipwreck – apparently searching for a way to open the bent remains of what appeared to be a door. Shepard came closer but was interrupted by a loud scream that came from inside the ship remains. Immediately the creatures started to moving around, shouting some commands in a weird, yet melodic language at each other. Completely ignoring the presence of Shepard they started pushing against the door, while the scream from inside intensified. A shiver went down Johanna's spine – even though she couldn't understand the language she could hear that the person screaming was in great pain. She rushed towards the door and started pushing as well, which resulted in one of the creatures giving her a quick confused look, before turning back on pressing against the burning hot steel of the barricade that blocked the way (Shepard assumed that it was a confused look, the mask made it more or less impossible to see the mimic of the person beneath).

The door was moving like in slow motion, giving way centimeter after centimeter, but the increasing temperature emitting from the metal made it harder and harder to keep pressure on the surface, as the heat started turning from mildly unpleasant to extremely painful in matter of seconds. Her eyes started watering and she had to bite on her lower lips to keep her self from screaming as the heat slowly started burning the skin of her arm away. Even after Johanna started to taste a hint of metal flooding her mouth she kept pushing.

Then the door suddenly gave in. Johanna took a few steps back as a wall of smoke and hot air hit her face, drying up her tears in an instant. Two of the creatures dashed into the sea of flames, seemingly oblivious to the inferno around them.

A felt eternity went by before the two creatures returned, one of them carrying the screaming person over his shoulder.

Shepard felt a slight relief when seeing the screaming creature (if it screams it at least is still alive), but was quickly reminded on what it has gone through when she accidentally touched her right arm. The sharp pain made her moan loudly, which sounded more like a scream with closed mouth than just moaning. She only then noticed that she had still been biting down on her now bloody lip.

It took her a while to calm down again and steady her breathing. After she looked up again she noticed that the creatures had laid down their wounded on the grass, far too close to the burning vessel for her liking. Careful not to startle the aliens she walked towards them and started talking to them: "Hey! I know you can't understand me, but I think it's safer if you move away from the wreck." She first pointed at the creatures and then at her house while doing so, slowly moving towards the front entrance herself.

After some confused looks between the suit-people they seemed to understand. They lifted up the now apparently unconscious survivor from before and started carrying her (Shepard had noticed that some of them seemed to have breasts while others did not, so she decided to call those with breasts 'female' and the ones without 'male' for the time being) into the living room of her house, and placed her on the couch, after the male that she had helped before stood up to take a chair instead.

Two of the aliens started treating the wounded female with a weird gel which they pulled from one of the many pockets they had on their suit, while the other one took a look at the male she had helped out in the beginning.

Only now the events of the past minutes started to get processed in the brain of Johanna, and she suddenly realized that she had just made first contact with a new species, something that had never been done before – and that she would've to call for some firefighters, which would cause some problems of their own (how in the world would she be able to explain the burning spaceship?).

Since her parents would come home sooner or later anyway there was no point in hiding it anyway, so she took out her smartphone and called the fire department. If this whole thing would become a problem, she would still have time to deal with it later. After she had explained to the lady at the other end of the call that something had landed in her front yard and caught fire she ended the call and went straight into her contacts list - she had another call to make.

She quickly scrolled through the list and pressed the call button.

"Jeff? You won't believe what just happened."

* * *

_Authors notes:_

_Hi everyone, Yaesephir here:_

_I know, this first chapter was a bit dull and probably boring – and the constant repetition of the word "creature" most likely got on your nerves. But try finding a way to describe a new species: It's not easy._

_This whole thing is more or less the set-up so that the story can get started, the next chapters will be more fun to read. Imo._

_(I think I should point out at this point that this is a slow-paced story, since I enjoy reading – and therefore writing – about the little details a world has to offer. If you are looking fast-paced action-oriented stories, then this story isn't the right one for you [yet])._

_Anyway it would really help me a brutally honest review about the story, since it's the first time for me writing a fanfiction. Also my mother tongue isn't English (who would've thought ^^) so criticism on my language is also extremely helpful._


	2. Barrier of speech

**Chapter 2: Barrier of speech**

„So let me get this straight: Some aliens were drunk driving and ended up trashing your flowerbed with their spaceship?"

„More or less."

„And then you called the firefighters and convinced them that 'it was probably just a crashed weather-satellite'?"

"Yupp."

"And then your second phone call goes to your boyfriend in wheelchair, who takes almost 40 minutes to arrive at your house rather than a doctor to get your arm treated?"

"You make it sound like it was a really stupid idea when you explain it like that – you know that I called the ambulance after that."

"Hey, it's not my arm that almost was turned into a large piece of bacon, so suit yourself."

Johanna rolled her eyes – she knew that Jeff was right, but he didn't have to be so blunt about it. She was really lucky that she didn't live that far away from a hospital, the doctors had told her that she was really lucky to still be able to use her arm. It would leave a nasty scar though. But that wasn't what was giving her headaches the most – it was the fact that she now had some unattended aliens running around in her living room while she was sitting here in the hospital. It wouldn't take long before the police would arrive to investigate what this huge chunk of metal in her front yard was, and that was only if she was lucky – with bad luck the press would arrive first, and she wasn't sure how handle them yet. If she told them that it was a space ship they would happily release an article about the crazy lunatic in the neighbourhood and would probably blame the education system with a headline like 'Is turning pressure from universities their students into dangerous psychopaths? Find out on page 6' or something.

Shepard winced a bit when Jeff patted her head lightly.

"Just you know – you had me worried."

Johanna smiled at that and put her head on his shoulder, while making sure not to put too much pressure on him. The Vrolik's syndrome had always been a problem, but the bisphosphonate therapy had slowly started showing effects, strengthening his bones enough that she didn't had to worry about breaking his bones every time she touched him – but she still was worried to accidentally hurt him, even though he said it was fine.

The stayed in this position for a while before they were interrupted by a nurse that stepped into the room.

"The doctor wanted to inform you that you may now leave, just make sure to apply the ointment we prescribed every evening to assist the recovery of your skin."

Jeff smirked at Shepard.

"What?"

"I just think you should buy yourself a new T-Shirt: 'I encountered an extraterrestrial race, and all I got was this shitty moisture-lotion'"

**/ Tali'Zorah nar Rayya's point of view /**

"Keelah, my leg is killing me" Tali groaned.

She had only awoken from her unconsciousness, just to find herself laying inside a large room filled with the four members of her crew and weird furniture and items she had never seen before.

"Where... where am I?" she asked.

Tali was confused about her surroundings, but for the moment she was mostly glad that all her crew members were still alive. After a few glances around the room she noticed a few things that looked familiar – chairs and tables (even if made from wood rather than metal or polycarbonate) looked fairly similar to the counterparts on the Migrant fleet, even if the surfaces were larger than what she was used to. At least the height was almost identical to Quarian furniture.

"We crashed on the planet-surface. Apparently our sensors weren't the only thing malfunctioning." one of the engineers explained.

"I can remember that much. Thank you for saving me by the way. But what is this place?" Tali continued. "It's nothing like I've seen before."

"Our sensors were more badly damaged then we first thought – it looks like this planet is already inhabited by a sentient species."

Tali quickly turned her head at the last sentence.

"Inhabited? You mean these here aren't ruins? What were you thinking, we have to get out of here before we make contact without approval of the fleet. You can't simply walk into one of their homes, you could start a war with something like that!"

The engineer paused a moment to think about his next words carefully. He slowly shook his head as he answered:

"We no longer have the luxury to choose whether to contact them or not: we already met the creature that is living in this home. It actually helped us to save your life."

Tali didn't know what to answer. She opened her mouth just to close it again – this was too much information at once. Not only did the whole crew just survive this insane crash relatively uninjured, but also they had to thank a member of a completely unknown species that all of them survived. She took another look around.

And apparently the species was already capable of mass production and the development of electronic technologies (she took a closer look at the humming thing in the corner of the room that seemed to rotate to whirl around the air in the room.) - how did a species like this go unnoticed for so long? She then reminded herself that they hadn't seen any indications of colonies on the nearby planets, even with their sensors broken it was likely that they hadn't achieved spaceflight yet (let alone FTL travel), so it wasn't that weird for one single planet to go unnoticed.

Tali wanted to ask another question when the door opened – and two creatures entered. One of them was a bit larger than Tali herself, with remarkable similarities to the Asari, aside from the skin-colour, which was a mix between a light brown and pink (she wasn't sure what to call this colour, as it wasn't really a common one) and the red about shoulder-long fur on the head instead of tentacles like Asari had. But what made her even more curious was the second being – instead of walking it was sitting in a weird vehicle with two large wheels, which appeared as though it was controlled by some buttons it was pressing with his right hand. It was hard to guess if this other creature was bigger or smaller than the first one from its sitting position. Tali noticed that it looked different from the red-furred one though, with a lot shorter black fur, which not only covered the top of its head, but also part of the face around the mandible. This, the lack of breasts and the bit harsher looking muscles made her assume that the second one was male and the first one female. It was hard to tell, since the clothes of those two didn't look that different, apart from a cap the sitting creature was wearing on his hat. She noticed that the creatures were also mustering her and her companions curiously. She was about to greet them when the male turned to the female and seemingly asked her something in their language. If she didn't wear her mask the two would've seen her raise an eyebrow as the two of them started laughing for some reason.

**/ Shepard's point of view /**

"No Jeff, I do not know if they need those suits or if they simply like latex." Shepard snickered. "Also I'm pretty sure that that's a question we shouldn't write down as one of the first words to this species in the history books."

"Oh come on Joy, you know that history books could use some events that don't make your feet fall asleep for a change."

Johanna cringed at the use of the nickname Jeff had given her – she knew that 'Johanna' didn't leave room for lot of nicknames, and that she would prefer 'Joy' over 'Jojo' every day, but it still made her uncomfortable. If she hadn't lost a bet, that no-one would ever call Jeff by his self proclaimed nickname 'Joker', she wouldn't allow him to call her by that name. Though it was kinda cute from time to time she had to admit.

"Yeah, maybe. But now that we are here – how do we communicate with them? Language-barrier and all."

Joker frowned.

"Have to admit that will be a small problem – but fear not, I already have a plan."

"And what plan exactly?"

"Math."

"Great plan, start an intergalactic war by boring the first members of a foreign species to death."

Jeff rolled his eyes and exhaled sharply.

"It's not that much about actually teaching them anything – they already achieved spaceflight, probably even at speeds greater than the speed of light, otherwise they wouldn't be standing here. It's safe to assume that they can handle that little mathematics I can come up with."

Shepard wasn't sure if it would help them in any way, but Jeff was right – it couldn't hurt them to try. She walked over to the table where her backpack for university was laying on and grabbed a pen and a writing pad. She returned to her boyfriend and handed over the writing equipment. She sighed a bit.

"Please make this work."

After a short amount of thinking she also added:

"And please don't write any obscenities."

**/ Tali'Zorah's point of view /**

Tali watched curiously as the two prepared some sort of white sheets – she assumed that it was how these creatures were documenting things. She was interested what the writing of this species would look like, but sad at the same time that they didn't seem to understand that her and none of her crew would be able to grasp what they were writing down. She was eager to find out what they wanted to show her, but she also feared their reaction if none of them would be able to answer them.

When the person in the chair-vehicle turned around the white slate she was surprised to see the picture of two hands with 5 fingers each. The red furred woman stretched out her hand to emphasize the drawing and then pulled back the hand to allow the male to continue drawing. He turned the writing-pad around again and started adding additional things.

The new sketch showed five people with masks and suits, with largly inflated hands, so that you could see that they only had three fingers.

The woman then pointed her left hand at the group of Quarians and held up her right hand with all five fingers stretched out. She then turned her left hand to point at herself and the other person and modified her hand-position, so that only two fingers were still visible. After repeating the gesture a few times the male showed them a new sketch, this time ten different drawings, each one showing two hands with different amounts of fingers stretched out. And below each hand there was a single sign.

"Are they... are they trying to teach us their number-system?" Veetor, one of the other engineers, asked.

"I guess so." Tali answered. "But why is there no drawing for all ten fingers stretched out?"

Tali had noticed that there were ten drawings, starting from no finger visible, up to 9 fingers visible, each with a different sign, but a sketch where all fingers were visible was missing. She didn't get to wonder for long, as the creature started drawing again.

This time he came up with different a drawing of three right hands next to each other, with a cross-shaped symbol between the first two hands, and two parallel lines between the second and third hand. The first two hands each had one finger visible, the third one had two fingers visible. Below the drawing was a small number of symbols: '1+1=2'

"That's probably their system of addition. The symbols from before match up."

The sitting person was about to start drawing again when Tali decided to step forwards. She stretched out her hand towards the writing-pad and made a motion with her right hand, to show them that she wanted to draw something as well. The two people took a quick look at each other, then the man handed over the writing pad and pen. Tali noticed that he didn't get up from his weird chair, even though it would make handing over the pad a lot easier.

After a few seconds Tali managed to get colour out of the pen (which luckily worked pretty much identically to a stylus she normally used to plan circuit-boards) and started drawing a few more pairs of those hands with five fingers. She started copying the symbols from before to show that she had understood the number-system and drew a few more equations, with the correct numbers, but symbols between them missing. Two hands with three fingers each and a third one with zero fingers to symbolize subtraction, two hands with two fingers each and a third one with four, to symbolize multiplication, and a few more states for division, exponentiation and similar concepts. She also draw a hand with all ten fingers visible with the plus-sign and a hand with one finger, to find out how this species handled numbers greater than the number of fingers on their hand.

She then returned the pad to the sitting man and waited while he and the female talked for a bit, before they filled out the blanks between the equations she had written down.

Cold sweat dropped when Tali realized how long they just had used, simply to explain a simple concept like basic mathematics – how would they be able to explain to these creatures that they would need food sooner or later – and how would they be able to explain that they might not be able to eat the food on this planet, without endangering one of her crew by making him test the food for everyone else? And only after they managed to exchange vital information like that they could start to think about a way to get back a message to the migrant fleet without a distress beacon (the one they had on board was most likely nothing more than a piece of garbage after the crash).

**/ Shepard's point of view /**

"Maybe we should've started by explaining binary..." Jeff mumbled. "Well, we can always do that later."

"Are you sure you want to keep teaching them maths?" Shepard asked.

"Yeah, why not?"

"I think they got it by now – and calculating stuff in our number-system won't exactly help them much. If I crashed on a foreign planet and my spaceship burned to the ground, I'd worry a lot more about medication, if my gas-tanks are large enough to keep me breathing, about clean water and food, about other possible dangers like radiation, I don't know, stuff like that."

Jokers eyes widened at this – he hadn't thought about this up until now, he was still to excited because he had met an ETI, a life-long dream of his.

"Damn, you're right. But my drawing-skills are too crappy to accurately depict complex stuff like that."

"I'll just get my laptop then and ask wikipedia for help."

Jeff had to laugh at this. Johanna raised on of her eyebrows.

"I just imagined the face of my old history teacher Mr. Adam, he always kept whining about how we are too dependent on this whole internet-encyclopedia, and how there are too many false articles in there."

"Really, you had teachers like that? Sounds pretty uptight to me."

"You forget that I had to go to a private school, because it was the only one which supported wheelchairs in my area."

"Yeah, guess you're right. Anyway, here it is."

Johanna handed over her Laptop.

"You think they will get stuff like country-borders?" she asked.

"Only one way to find out." Jeff said as he opened the Laptop and started up searching for something on the web.

"Hey Joy."

"Hmm?"

"Do you think we would get paid by Microsoft if we used bing-maps to explain them where they are? I mean this whole thing will go down in history and stuff, would probably be good advertisement for them."

"I'd rather not go down in history as the single idiot who used bing."

"Good point."

* * *

_Author's notes:_

_Hi everyone, Yaesephir again!_

_When I uploaded my story yesterday I was really surprised how many people seemed to stumble upon it within minutes. Really motivating to see the follower amount raise so quickly, I can tell you. To celebrate I prepared a cover-picture for my story, which will go online together with this chapter._

_Back to the story: I decided to pair up Femshep and Joker. Why? First of all because I hate stories that take 60 chapters just to get the characters to realize that they have a thing for each other, and then another 40 chapters to build up drama so that they can get together, just that the series gets canceled the chapter after they first kissed. Fuck this shit. In my story they are already together and I will explain how they got together by adding hints towards it in conversations. I will also try to avoid angst: I hate characters constantly whining. Sure, it's in the 101 of writing skills: expose your character to some traumatic experiences to build character, but many writers overdo it._

_I handle stuff like this my way, which is the following: Character is already in the situation I like him to be in and I will explain how he got there afterwards – this leaves room for artistic freedom and character progression without annoying the shit out of my readers._

_A good example for this is Jokers Vrolik's syndrom: I mentioned that his bones are a stronger than they are in the game, and that he will be fine in a few years (which will be after the first timeskip probably), and then mentioned how this happened: the bisphosphonate therapy. In the original ME-series Vroliks is described as more or less incurable disease which can only be partially cured by extreme actions like implanting steel-parts into the bones (ME2), the reality looks a bit different. We already have a treatement for Vroliks, or 'Osteogenesis Imperfecta' how it's called in the medical fields, the so called bisphosphonate therapy. Through this treatment the body gets animated to increase the bone-density, which results in the bones not breaking that often anymore. It's still not a perfect treatment, but it will make a few things a lot more logical – I mean how would Joker get into the Alliance military in the first place if he has a disease like that. But enough of that._

_Now I have to mention that I really really LOVE writing Joker. I enjoy writing humor-passages and hope that I could capture his sense of humor, and maybe even get some of my readers to smirk. I hope that I don't take it too far though, I still want to tell a story..._

_I hope you enjoyed this chapter, if you did (or didn't) feel free to drop a review, it would really help me out to find the faults in my writing-style. Again I have to mention that English isn't my first language, so I do make a lot of mistakes. If you see me using a word incorrectly or a mistake in my grammar: Please correct me._

_With all of that said: See ya tomorrow._


	3. Better than expected

**Chapter 3: Better than expected.**

Rael'Zorah was running around in circles, the eyes behind his mask deprived of sleep and his stomach hurting from worry. He was still waiting for an answer from his daughter, he knew that she was busy with her pilgrimage, but he still was worried sick. A few days ago the largest cyber-attack in the history of the Quarians had disabled 90% of the migrants fleets systems, killing almost three thousand people through failing life support systems and other vital hardware. If not one of the engineers in training had come up with the idea to quickly attack the own systems with a different virus to force a restart, not many would've survived that incident.

The tech-experts were alarmed when they found out that the virus had specifically targeted ships with Quarian identification, and a high priority message was sent out to all Quarians on pilgrimage, to immediately change their ships identification for the time being and to report back their current status. Most had reported back within hours, some didn't report back immediately, because they didn't have a vessel that could be harmed in the first place. And some didn't report back at all.

Tali'Zorah and her crew was one of them.

Shala'Raan vas Tonbay had tried to calm him down in the beginning, but as the hours passed and still no message returned she grew increasingly nervous as well.

"We have to do something! Have you checked for any updates? Have you tried pinging her ship?" Rael asked himself rather than directing it towards a specific person.

"We did all we could, we have checked all known channels, we even deactivated the filter-system in case the message is damaged and the catchphrase wasn't complete – absolutely nothing." Shala answered.

She was worried about Rael, she had never seen him this upset before – she knew that he was proud of his daughter more than he openly admitted, but at times like this you could see that the mere thought of losing his daughter came dangerously close to breaking him. Other members of the Admiralty-board would see it as weakness, but Shala knew Rael long enough to know that this 'weakness' came from him hiding his emotions at all times in the first place. Shala once more tried to calm him down:

"The sector she last visited is pretty far away from any message beacons, it's likely that she simply didn't get our message. Also without communication it's unlikely that the virus infected her ship, don't you think?"

Rael rocked his head at this: "That's it! Her last known location! We can send an exploration-vessel there and transmit the message directly this way. Best case scenario: We manage to warn her before something happens to her. Worst case: we have someone over there to help her out!"

Shala forced a smile onto her face. Rael had always been an optimist. The way he described it did sound like a good idea, but in reality she doubted that it would be that easy. The last known location of Tali's crew was pretty near the Batarian space, the worst case scenario could turn into his daughter being enslaved and him sending another team directly into the arms of slavers. But she wouldn't mention this thought – he would send this team no matter if she was against it or not, and she would only take away that little hope he had.

**/ Shepard's point of view /**

"Do you know if they want something to eat? I'm making lasagna." Hannah Shepard asked her daughter.

Johanna had to blink a few times before slowly shaking her head. She always had a hard time wrapping her head around the fact that her mother was more or less impossible to catch off guard. When her mother had returned from her work as a toxicologist from the pharmacology-company she was working for she had found her garden destroyed by a multiple meters wide crater, her house surrounded by reporters and the police, and her living room occupied by five weird creatures in strange looking suits that didn't seem to speak her language, something that didn't seem to stop her daughters boyfriend from holding a powerpoint presentation on the human DNA for two of the creatures, and Johanna explaining a map of Europe and Germany in specific to the other three beings. And the only reaction she got out of her? If she wanted to offer her "guests" a piece of lasagna.

And worst of all? She didn't know the answer to that question.

They had been explaining different things about biology, geography, physics, mathematics, language and similar stuff for hours now, but they still had no clue how they could help their visitors. From different sketches they exchanged they had found out that these aliens could breath the air on earth, so they didn't have to worry about running out of oxygen, but they couldn't remove their suit, because the bacterias on earth were likely to kill them without their immune-system adjusting to it first (at least this was how Shepard had interpreted the increasingly complex drawing they were creating). This caused a small problem, since pretty much everything on earth was contaminated with bacterias, so preparing food for them was out of question for now. Johanna hoped that they could use one of the clean rooms at her mothers workplace, that normally were used to deal with toxic chemicals, to prepare some food (these rooms were probably cleaner than most hospitals, so it would hopefully be enough to not put the creatures into serious danger). But she had to come up with a convincing explanation for her mother up first, and that was probably the hardest part.

Her train of thought was interrupted by her mother:

"Are you sure? Your alien friends here look hungry."

Shepard once again had to blink.

"Wait what. You know?"

"Well, it wasn't that hard to figure out. Huge piece of satellite in front lawn, police and reporters everywhere, three-fingered creatures in living room approximately fifteen meters away from said piece of metal, Jeff trying his hardest to explain human biology to them... If you want to keep this a secret you have to try harder sweetie."

'Yupp, definitely impossible to catch off guard' Shepard thought to herself.

"Okay, that does make my question kinda easier: can we maybe come to your workplace tomorrow? It looks like those... aliens need a sterile environment to take in their food on this planet." Johanna asked.

"You know that letting strangers into the facility can get my fired? Then again, no-one would probably notice if we put them into some hazmat-suits. It's not like it's a big change from their current outfit. But may I ask you a question instead: How do you plan on hiding them? It will not take long before someone else notices that this piece of space-garbage isn't one of our own."

Johanna took a breath, before answering. She had asked that same question herself multiple times already and had also discussed it with Joker already, and had come to a conclusion:

"I don't."

Hannah only raised her eyebrow, her glance asking Johanna to continue:

"I have thought about it for a while, and came to the conclusion that hiding this won't do any good. Mankind has always asked itself if we are alone out there – now we finally have the answer to that. If we hide it now this whole thing will just turn into yet another conspiracy theory told by lunatics on some shady imageboards on the internet, with some blurry pictures and badly photoshopped images to 'prove' their story. Even if the authorities figure out that this spaceship isn't made from a human, they will still take weeks to go through the proper channels to get an answer on how to handle the situation. And in the end the politicians will either decide to sweep it under the rug, to 'prevent panic' or some other bullshit reason, or they will decide to actually do something, and then discuss for a few more months on what exactly to do. But we are in a position now, where we have more than just some badly faked pictures: We have the remains of the vessel, we have five LIVING members of their species. We can't let this opportunity go to waste – we have to act now, politicians will have to react as fast as possible."

Her mother lowered her eyebrow and looked at the floor for a bit, visibly in deep thought. After quite a while she raised her head again and turned towards the kitchen. Before walking away she turned her head and spoke to her daughter once again:

"I hope you know what you're doing. We still have quite a few wars going on between some people, who only differ from each other in the name they give their big imaginary friend in the sky and the meat they aren't allowed to eat. Just be aware that for the first time those people will be forced to face someone who is truly different from them."

And with that she walked away.

**/ Tali's point of view /**

Tali was once again surprised by the species they had encountered. When they first started scribbling on this piece of paper, she had feared that they had found a rather primitive race, which was incapable of understanding the concept of a language barrier. And now said creatures were teaching them various facts about the planet they were living on in a rather complex symbol based system they had taught them over the past hours.

Not only did this species have pictures of their own planet from outside the atmosphere, they apparently had also already figured out how their own gen-material worked, sent a member of their folk to the planet's moon, but also seemed to possess a vast knowledge on how to overcome communication issues between their races, where none of them knew the culture of the other.

But what impressed Tali the most was the third member of their species (also a female) which had entered the house a few minutes ago: While the first two had been excited about meeting a different species and had literally talked and explained for hours, without gaining anything from it, the third one simply acknowledged their existence by taking a quick glance at them, before turning to the other female being. Not a hint of curiosity was visible on her, she acted like it was an everyday occurrence. Had this species encountered a different sentient race before the Quarians? Had the other two people prepared her on what to expect without any of her crew-members noticing? The possibilities were endless, one more fascinating than the other.

Apart from this the Quarians were lucky to still have some food-rations left inside their suits, otherwise this whole trip could quickly end in a disaster: From the slides the sitting person was showing them they had learned that this species was levo-amino based, not dextro-amino. While not necessarily dangerous to eat, Quarians didn't have the necessary digestive system to get nutrition from levo-based food. This meant that if they weren't rescued before they ran out of emergency-rations or found a plant on this planet that at least contained some dextro-based proteins, they would starve to death. That is if they didn't die from an infection first. Her own suit had been punctured on different parts during the crash, which they fixed with that little bit of patching-material they had left.

Tali had already started developing a plan to send out a distress signal without the need for an emergency-beacon. Actually she had multiple ideas, but each and every single of them at a fatal flaw she had yet to overcome. The first plan included simply building a new one, but she was missing the necessary tools and materials, and building the system from scratch was nearly impossible without a micro-scale production facility. Another problem was that she didn't know if this species had found a way to mine and enrich element zero already – without enough eezo she wouldn't be able to power the generator to send the message over the large distance to the next communication-buoy.

The second plan involved manipulating communication-systems this species was using (from explanations she knew that they were calling themselves 'hyumen'). Since they already had satellites in orbit, a fact that had not only surprised her, but her whole crew, it was safe to assume that they had some sort of control-center from which they sent commands to the machines in orbit. With a few adjustments into the right file format she should be able to broadcast a message that could be picked up by the communication-buoys. But that was the largest problem: she had to convince these hyumen that her species meant no harm to them – no matter how peaceful they seemed so far, every race would have serious doubts exposing the position of their homeworld to a, from their point of view, highly advanced species, that could possibly wipe out their entire population, enslave them or do other horrible things to the citizens on the planet. It would be hard to earn their trust.

But Tali knew at the same time what huge opportunity was in reach: A new species that didn't know about the citadel races yet, a race that wasn't influenced by hate towards the Quarians, that didn't know that they greatly outnumbered her own people, a race that would be grateful for being uplifted, a race that could potentially turn into allies in the future. And they could maybe even help her out with her pilgrimage-gift. Tali smiled at this idea.

Everything was going better than expected.

**/ Unknown point of view /**

The scientist still had no clue what to make out of the strange readings. The material behaved nothing like any other known element they had encountered so far. He had rerun the simulations dozens of times, the result always the same: this new element didn't fit into the current physical model. When exposed to an electric current it was able to manipulate the higgs-boson field and with that not only it's own weight, but also the weight of things in a large field around it.

It was extremely fascinating – and extremely unstable. The researcher wasn't sure how an element like this could possibly exist outside a high-pressure environment like the core of a sun. Then again pressure most likely didn't mean anything to this element, as it could simply manipulate the gravitational field around it.

The scientist had to smile.

This single element possibly held the answers to so many questions humanity hadn't been able to answer in the past decades: Why did the universe expand faster than it should? Was it possible to explain the structure of our galaxy without unnecessarily complex placeholders like dark matter? Why wasn't the universe symmetrical? So many things that could possibly answered with this single thing. If 'the god-particle' wasn't already taken this element would definitely take the name – he was sure of it.

But the element wasn't the only fascinating thing he and his colleagues would have fun with within the next few days: They had burned remains of different tools and technologies unlike anything here on earth, plating-material that could resist extreme temperatures and maybe – just maybe – they would even be able to find out where this spaceship had come from.

* * *

_Author's notes:_

_Hi everyone, Yaesephir again!_

_I was blown away by the amount of views I got in such a short amount of time – thank you guys, it really motivates me (a few reviews wouldn't hurt though, didn't really get any suggestions on how to improve yet ^^)._

_Some of you may be wondering where I'm going with this story, but fear not, I'm still busy slowly introducing what kind of universe this whole story is taken place in, which could cause quite a few questions:_

_Who attacked the migrant-fleet with a virus and why? What exactly is Shepard planning? Will Tali's strategy for a communication-system work out? Who is the unknown scientist working for, and how did he get his hands on parts of the shipwreck that fast (there is no time-skip between the scenes, it's only a few hours after the crash)? In what country did this crash even happen? And how exactly will the Quarians deal with the food-shortage?_

_Another word I'd like to add about the whole Quarian vs. Human food thingy: Like many of you know the Humans are a levo-based species (like the Asari), while Quarians are a dextro-based species (like the Turians), a fact that is often used in conversations within the game (e.g. when Mordin gives a Talimancer-Shepard "the talk"), and has upset many fans of the series: A levo-race will not be able to eat food of a dextro-race without the food turning into some sort of deadly toxin, or killing them from allergic shock or something._

_Reality – again – differs quite a lot from this description: Just like the Vrolik's syndrom it was introduced as an interesting fact to build character and make the world more believable and interesting. A romance that could possibly kill you is just way more interesting than a normal and 'boring' romance. But like with Vrolik's the authors of mass effect simply used it in a way that would benefit their story (which is totally fine, but something that won't work with the kind of story I'm trying to tell), not in a way that is scientifically accurate._

_Yes, levo-rotary acids and dextro-rotary acids exist. Yes, the human race is based on levo-rotary amino-acids, and if something had gone a little bit different in the beginnings of evolution we would maybe today all be dextro-rotary instead, without really noticing any difference. BUT there is a little detail that they didn't mention: If you have ever eaten anything with sugar in it, you have already consumed some dextro-rotary molecules, and if you read this story, it's safe to assume that it didn't kill you._

_Don't get me wrong, you CAN have allergic reactions to levo-rotary acids, but they don't happen more frequently than normal allergies, and humans don't even have problems to digest dextro-rotary molecules, like described in some other fanfictions._

_For the sake of the story I adjusted this flaw and made it scientifically more accurate, but changed the Quarian biology a bit, so that they still can't consume levo-based food (it won't kill them, but their digestive-system simply won't allow them to use the nutritions of the food)._

_With all of that said: see ya in the next chapter._

_~Yaesephir_


	4. No laughing matter

**Chapter 4: No laughing matter**

_Hi everyone, Yaesephir again._

_Some people asked me if I could include timestamps when I change the point of view in my story. I think this question has something to do that I didn't explain what I meant with time skips properly: changes of perspective are normally no time skips. When I change perspective between Tali and Shepard the only reason is, that those two can't understand each other so far, and are thinking different things because of this. The story starts in the year (let's say) 2019 on some random day, which one isn't really important, and until now not a single day has passed. In between chapters a few hours have gone by, but I think that should be fairly obvious from statements like "they had explained stuff for hours without gaining anything from it" (not a quote, I'm just too lazy to search for the real sentence)._

_What I meant by time skips are large amounts of time which I will only cover in a way, that they read like a protocol:_

_In year 20xx this and that happened, which lead to this and that in the year 20xy, and now the story continues in 20xz, x years after that event._

_I'm not even sure when I will include a time skip like that, and what a period of time it will cover, but I'm pretty sure that there will be one in the near future (because the first chapters are mainly about building/describing the world this whole story takes place in, after I'm 'finished' with that, there is not much reason to keep up the slow pace, so a skip is only logical.)_

_Because of that I decided NOT to include timestamps when they are not necessary: so if you see a change of perspective without timestamp, simply assume that it happens directly after the last scene, or that the time is absolutely obvious._

_With that out of the way I wanted to thank everyone who is reading this story, it's absolutely ridiculous how many views this story is getting: It is only 3 days old, and the story already has 600+ different readers, summing up to a total of 1500 views on all chapters (with 90% or more being visitors without a -account, so if one of you guys want to leave a review: feel free to register on this site, you won't regret it ^^)._

_Let's continue!_

* * *

**/ Shepard's point of view, the morning after the crash /**

Johanna yawned and almost spilled her cup of coffee – she was still tired of the night before, since they had kept teaching their visitors until almost 4 AM. At first she had wondered if these aliens didn't need sleep, or how else they could work for that long, but then Jeff had joked that they probably simply had a jet lag, and Johanna had figured that he was probably even right with this: She had no idea what day-night-cycle these creatures had on their homeplanet, maybe they had a 30 hour day, maybe they weren't day-active beings, maybe they lived on a continent that had a similar situation to countries like Finland, where day and night wasn't really distinguishable for most of the year.

Jeff in the meantime didn't seem to be in need of coffee, he looked like the word 'tired' didn't exist in his vocabulary. Not only was he wide awake, he was already coming up with stupid ideas on how to convince the suit-people to get them to wear some girly looking pajamas next time, and babbled something about how a picture of that would make the most epic computer-wallpaper ever. Shepard didn't really listen, she had a had time figuring out why her cup was already empty again.

When Shepard proceeded to get herself a new cup of the black make-awake-liquid Joker complained a bit.

"You know that that stuff isn't healthy for you, right? You'll kill yourself one day with with a caffeine-overdose, and you know that I prefer my girlfriend, you know, alive."

"Bit of necrophilia never killed anyon- nevermind, it probably did." Johanna replied. She had wanted to tease Jeff a bit, but she was aware that in her half-asleep state the irony in the sentence would probably not be obvious, and she didn't want to end up insulting him by implying that he was into corpses or something. So she changed her mind and tried to change the conversation into a different direction:

"And like you're the one to talk, you drink more litres of tea a day than I drink cups of coffee a week."

"Yeah, but that only had teaine in it."

"Teaine and caffeine are the same thing genius."

"Oh."

Slowly Shepard's brain started functioning at full capacity, and she noticed that the table in front of Jeff was covered by sheets of papers. She walked over to him and put her arms around him from behind, curiously looking over his shoulder.

"What are those drawings?"

"I'm awake for some time already, and thought that preparing the sketches in advance would save us some time later. I also googled and went through some SciFi-forums, to check if maybe someone maybe had already prepared a first contact cheatsheets or other stuff that could help us to communicate with our latexian friends."

"...please don't call them latexians."

"Why? Do you have a better name for them?"

"No, but I don't want to have to explain to them why my boyfriend named them after some weird fetish of his if we ever learn their language."

"Hey, why is it a fetish of mine if I may ask? I'm not the one dressing up in skin-tight latex suit."

A grin appeared on Shepard's face, growing wider and wider with every second. Joker didn't notice until Johanna started chuckling, the chuckles turning into an uncontrollable laughter, that went as far that Shepard had to step away from Jeff's wheelchair to hold her belly, because her stomach started to hurt.

"What is so funny?" Jeff asked, not sure why she had to laugh this hard.

Shepard in the meantime was already rolling on the floor, trying to catch a breath between the chuckles and the hiccup that had started at the same time. Tears started to fill her eyes, the sounds coming from her constantly changing between laughter and crying, since her stomach hurt so bad. This continued for a few minutes, before the laughter slowly started to die down, only leaving behind a broadly smiling Johanna with wet eyes and hiccups and a confused Jeff.

"Care to explain why you collapsed just now?" he asked.

"Your last sentence, that the aliens are the ones wearing a tight latex-suit, not you. It gave me this really weird image of you in a latex-suit."

Shepard started giggling again – and the giggling once again turned into loud laughter, this time not only from Shepard, but also Jeff, whom Johanna had infected with her stupid giggling. They both were laughing so hard, that none of them noticed the group of Quarians that was watching them from the door to the kitchen.

**/ Tali's point of view /**

Tali wasn't sure what to make of the absurd scene that was taking place in front of her. Both of the creatures that had helped them yesterday were gasping uncontrollably for air, one of them even going as far as having fallen to the floor, the other one had rotated his chair with tires towards the woman on the floor and both of them sounded like they were laughing (the woman made a pretty weird variation of this though, where the sound immediately stopped every few seconds, just to release a high-pitched squeak, just to go back to laughing normally). On top of that the female even seemed to be in pain, which didn't stop her partner (Tali had guessed that the male was her life-mate from a few intimate gestures she had seen, like hugging or a gesture where the both of them connected their mouths) from laughing at her.

She had also noticed that the male was never standing up from his chair, not even now to help up the female. Tali wondered if this maybe had some cultural background, she had already developed a theory based on what she had seen: Maybe the females in this society had a higher status than the males, and to express that the males had to stay at a lower level than their female counterparts. At the same time the exact opposite was thinkable: Maybe they considered walking as work and only males were worthy of having this form of transportation. But Tali knew that only after seeing another male she would be able to make an educated guess.

"Are you sure that it's a good idea to get our information from these two?" Veetor asked from behind. "They don't seem to take the situation too seriously."

"I'm also having some doubts, but they are the best source for information we have at the moment. And they were pretty helpful yesterday. And it's not like we have much choice, we don't have enough time to search for other people, not that I would suggest it if we had the time. We don't know how other members of their species would react to us – maybe it was pure luck that we met some individuals that don't take it that seriously, others might get the idea that it would be safer to them to lock us away, or even dissect us to get information about us."

The hyumen had calmed down by now and the red-furred one was getting up from the floor, removing some dust from her clothes and grabbed the cup with black liquid in it that she had put on the table earlier. The male meanwhile had returned to drawing something on one of the many sheets of paper that were lying in front of him.

Tali decided to knock against the door frame, and hoped that they understood that she simply wanted to draw attention to her group, not that she wanted to damage their home or question it's stability.

Both of them turned their heads towards the door when they heard the sound and stopped for a second. Then they started laughing again.

**/ Unknown point of view, unknown location /**

"Is it ready yet?"

The doctor pressed a few buttons on his keyboard, before turning back to his superior.

"Yes, the recording is running again, we can resume."

"Okay, then continue – we wasted enough time with this small incident, we need to get this stuff running as soon as possible."

Instead of answering the doctor simply nodded and turned back to the screens.

"July the sixth, day two of operation 'Icarus' heritage', test object Epsilon-Two, attempt number forty-eight. Cameras operational again, experiment can resume. Generator-start in three, two, one..."

He pressed the green button and turned his glance towards the test-chamber. A few seconds nothing happened, and the doctor already feared that this was yet another failure, when suddenly the object started emitting an orange light. The light flickered for a bit, before changing into a more stable form and revealing a menu-screen in a weird language.

The doctor and his co-workers stared at the object for a while before the whole laboratory-team exploded into cheers and cries. They did it. They finally managed to get one of the alien-technology working again.

**/ Shepard's point of view /**

Shepard scratched the top of her index-finger with the middle-finger on the same hand and stared at the ceiling – a pose she often used when thinking about something. After checking out the drawings Joker had fabricated she knew that they would have a lot harder time, the more complex the themes became. How do you explain that some humans are not to be trusted, without possibly damaging your own trustworthiness, and that of humanity as a whole?

After a while she shook her head. This would be a problem Jeff would have to deal with, not her.

Jeff had suggested that Johanna should start working on her plan to expose the aliens to the public, without looking like a total nutjob, so that they could maybe secure some help from professionals, but without putting their visitors into danger at the same time. One huge problem they had stumbled upon was that those things weren't human. This might seem obvious, but this also implied something that wasn't quite this easy to grasp: They weren't human beings, which meant that they had no human rights in front of the law. At best they would have some animal-rights, but those still wouldn't protect them from scientists that decided that testing on them would be a good idea. But then again sooner or later they would have to face other humans – and then it would maybe help if they already had the support of said scientists, since it could help them being taken seriously by the media.

But how would they convince a famous scientist (or multiple) to support their cause? For mere students like them it wasn't the end of the world if people thought they were a bit crazy, but a researcher could lose his job over that. And they had to make sure that the researcher was from a private institute, and not somehow connected to the government. Politicians were the most dangerous of all things in their plan, mostly because they behaved so irrational most of the time.

Shepard had already scratched her first plan of simply releasing a video on youtube: the most likely results included everyone thinking that it was fake, or some sort of viral marketing campaign for an upcoming movie, that is if the video even managed to surpass a hundred views. In the end it would probably be better to not shout out "I have found an alien lifeform!" but release information like their DNA-sequence and shout "I have found something interesting – what could it be?" instead. But this caused even more problems: how would they extract DNA from the creatures without 1. angering them and 2. damaging these suits they needed to survive.

A knock on the front-door forced her out of her thoughts. Alarmed Johanna glanced at Jeff and made some gestures to hide their guests somehow. Unwanted visitors were something they really didn't need right now.

"One moment" she shouted towards the door, and walked towards it as slow as possible, to buy Joker a bit more time. She closed the door to the living room behind her, took a last breath and then opened the door to see who it was. She didn't even get to open her mouth before as a large team of heavily armed guys surrounded her.

"Hannah Shepard?" one of the men asked her, evidently the leader of the group.

"No... no, that would be my mother. I'm Johanna Shepard. What is the problem? Or better: who are you?"

The leader took a judging look at her before answering.

"My name is not important, important is only the following: I'm from the MAD, the Ministry for Military Counter-Intelligence Service, and you along with every person in this house will have to come with me."

* * *

_Author's notes:_

_Hello again, Yaesephir as always!_

_I can imagine that some of you have the following question right now: Who the fuck is the MAD, how does MAD stand for Ministry for Military Counter-Intelligence Service, and what do they want from Shepard? The answer is simple:_

_MAD stands for 'Militärischer Abschirmdienst" and is one of the German ministries for military intelligence (like the DIA, NGA, NRO and NSA in the US) which is responsible for counter-measures to espionage, sabotage and terrorist activities._

_So... why the MAD, why a German ministry? The answer to that: because in my story Shepard and company live in Germany. The reason for that is, once again, to influence the universe I'm building. In the original games the alliance is formed after the discovery of the Prothean ruins, where the possible enemy, the to this point yet unknown other alien races haven't found earth yet. This way humanity has a bit of time to set aside their differences, find common goals and prepare one of the largest fleets in citadel space. But in my story they find out about extraterrestrial races by some of them directly landing on our homeworld, and rather unnoticed on top of that. This WILL cause a bit harsher reactions, and the opinions on how to handle the situation will go in all sorts of different directions._

_So again the question: why Germany?_

_If you ask a random German if he is proud of his country, or for being German, many will still answer with 'no', being ashamed or feeling guilty for their (ancestors) past. Of those that answer 'yes' are a few idiots that still go on about Germany being strong, and what not. But most will be proud of something different: that they managed to start anew and learn from the mistakes of the past. Today Germany is one of the most pacifistic nations on earth, where the majority of the population would get rid of their own military if they could. It has even come as far that old enemies have complained to Germany, that they don't use their military conflicts in current conflicts all around the world (e.g. France and the UK complained when Germany didn't send troops to help in Syria, or said that there weren't enough soldiers in Afghanistan)._

_What do you think would happen if a country so fundamentally afraid of becoming a military power once again is the first one to find out about a possible threat to all of humanity?_

_Tl;dr: I think it will be interesting to read how this whole thing will unfold ^^_

_If you want to complain, suggest something or even make a compliment: feel free to leave a review or PM, I'm reading all of them :D_

_See ya next time,_

_~Yaesephir._


	5. A house in the woods

**Chapter 5: A house in the woods**

**/ Tali's point of View /**

Tali didn't like the situation she was in – and apparently the same thing applied to the two hyumen who had helped her and her crew out since they had crashed. It all had started when someone knocked on the front-door of the house about two hours ago. She and the other Quarians were standing in the large room, teaching the male about the Quarian physiology for a change instead of learning about things of these beings, when the female whispered something to the man in the chair-vehicle, which caused him to immediately go quiet and make some gestures for her group to be silent as well. He them to get behind a cover or something to conceal themselves, but it was too late – a large group of people stormed the building and surrounded her and her crew, pointing some black guns at them. The design was a bit different from guns she had known, most common guns used light shades of grey, that weren't as obvious in urban areas, but the weapons these people were using were pure black, and had a lot more intimidating look to them (other than that they didn't differ much from most weapons). But it wasn't only the guns that made her that nervous, but how precise the movements of the soldiers were: Within seconds the group had surrounded them in a way, that allowed them to start fire, without having to worry about accidentally hitting one of their comrades. One of the men made some gestures towards the male in his chair-vehicle, that he should lay on the ground, and it was only after a protest from his part that Tali understood that he maybe simply couldn't leave his chair.

After shouting something another man stepped towards them, the main difference between him and the group was, that he wasn't armed. Tali figured that he might be the leader of the group – behind him the red-furred woman was standing, the shock visible in her face. After a short command from the leader he turned around and walked outside, the female following him nervously. Her partner also started turning his chair towards the door and started moving, and the group of armed people made it clear, that the Quarians had to leave the house as well.

Tali thought if she could maybe escape somehow, but without a weapon it was hopeless – even if there were only half as many people aiming at her. She slowly started walking with the hands behind her head, a gesture she hoped would be understood as cooperative, and followed the woman who was walking in front of her outside, where she spotted some sort of large vehicle.

The leader and female stepped into the back of the wheeled vehicle, Tali and the Quarians following a few seconds later. After the soldiers had lifted the man with his chair into the area, that if this was a ship would most likely be called cargo bay, they also moved inside the vehicle, always at least half of the group still aiming their weapons at them at any given moment. They shut the backside of the vehicle, sat down, and the vehicle started moving.

**/ Shepard's point of view /**

Johanna could feel how she slowly started to panic. She had thought that sooner or later maybe the police would arrive to question her, and thought of scenarios how she would tell them to get lost, and that she wouldn't answer a single question without a search warrant.

But when she opened the door she hadn't expected a man from the MAD and a whole GSG9 task force to greet her, and she was even less prepared when they already had a search warrant ready, so there wasn't much that she could do. Everything after that happened way to fast, and now she was sitting in the back of a transporter, not sure where they were heading. She was worried what they would do to them, when she realized a detail that didn't seem to fit into the situation: None of them had been handcuffed.

Before she could ask the guy from the MAD spoke up:

"I want to get this out of the way real quick, so listen up: You are not, I repeat, you are NOT under arrest. We are simply asking for your cooperation in this matter – I'm pretty sure that you guys have realized that these are not normal circumstances, normally we'd simply question you guys until we get the information we need, but we would probably waste valuable time trying to get you to comply with our demands. We simply want you guys to work together with us, so that we can finish this as fast as possible. You don't have to worry, after you told us everything we need to know you are free to go, and you'll even get a compensation. Do you understand?"

Both Shepard and Joker blinked a few times before nodding their head. Shepard had to admit that this was kind of unexpected, but then again it was the most logical thing to do in this situation: Why waste energy trying to run in a door, if you could simply knock on it and ask the owner to open it. They both visibly relaxed, Shepard then turned her head to the aliens.

"What will happen to them?" she asked no-one in particular.

"We will let some experts try to communicate with them to find out what they are after, before deciding how to deal with them." the guy from the MAD admitted.

Shepard wasn't sure what to think of this, but it was clear that she wasn't the one making decisions here, so there was nothing she could do. All she could do was to hope for the best.

**/ Joker's point of view | about two hours later /**

To any person watching it would seem like Jeff Moreau was simply resting a bit, his eyes closed and shoulders relaxed, since the were traveling for quite a while already. But his outward appearance was in stark contrast to what was going on inside him – he was highly concentrated, keeping track of every move and turn the transporter was taking, calculating the direction they were taking as well as the relative distance Shepard's home, where their journey had started, with nothing more than the acceleration he could feel. Obviously the results would differ from their real destination, as they didn't have any sort of window in the area they were sitting in, which made determining their speed a lot harder, but Jeff had manipulated his wheelchair after entering the transporter, so that it would swing like a pendulum whenever the car accelerated or decelerated, which made it a lot easier to make an educated guess on their moving speed. In front of his inner eye Jeff could see a map of the surrounding area, and he was pretty sure that he could pinpoint their position to a radius of a few hundred metres if he needed to. It had helped that the transporter hadn't tried to overtake other cars while on the highway, it would've made everything a lot harder for him.

It was all thanks to the amount of time Jeff had spent in his flight-simulator at home that he was able to guess velocities and calculate directions simply from the amount of degrees in each turn. He had even modded his wheelchair at one point, so that it would react to flight-maneuvers he was taking, so that the whole simulation would become more immersive. For quite some time the flight-simulations were the only thing he had been doing. It had all started because of the school he had visited in the past.

Jeff had hated his school-life. He was born in Canada, and his parents had always tried their best to make sure that he had a good life. They had moved a couple of times when he couldn't stand his school anymore, but at one point he had simply given up, and had stayed at the private school his parents had chosen for him. Bullying wasn't the worst problem he had faced, actually it was the smallest. His mother had always been extremely worried that someone might try to hurt her beautiful son, but that wasn't was happened. Most of the time he simply became lonely and isolated. It had always been like this: He had entered a new school, some kids decided it would be cool to hang out with the kid in wheelchair, and at first it had looked like everything would be fine. At least it did so from the outside – but Jeff had learned that it was never about him, it was always about the people around him. They didn't want to be his friend because they found him to be an interesting person – they befriended him because they felt pity for him, or even guilt of some sort. The result was that Jeff had always felt like imprisoned in a cocoon made out of glass: Everyone was afraid of getting to close to him, and no-one behaved normally around him, because everyone was afraid of accidentally hurting him. And that had hurt him more than any insult ever could.

And then he had simply stopped visiting school. He could afford it, as he still aced every test he had to take (and because it was a private school, where they didn't worry to hard about the pupils breaking regulations, as long as the money from the parents kept coming), and just like this he had all the free time he could ever want, which he spent in all sorts of simulators, just to escape reality for a bit. One after another he dropped the different simulators, until only a few different ones were left, all of them flight simulators for different machines. When the scenario wasn't hard enough he would simply tweak the software until it was challenging again, when he ran out of challenges for a certain type of machine he would simply search the internet for mods or would add machines of his own to keep him occupied. His family started to get worried about their son, who had seemingly had given up to live a normal life.

So when his father got a job offer from a large German company they decided to use the opportunity to start a new life, where their son would be forced to interact with people if he wanted to learn the language.

This was when Jeff had met Shepard and his whole life had changed.

Jeff opened his eyes when the transporter suddenly came to a full stop. When the motor got turned off he finished his calculations and determined that they had were now about 180 kilometers linear distance from Shepard's home, sadly he was no longer able to match his surroundings to any parts of the many maps he had learned from all the simulations, as they were now in some sort of forest-area, which had no large streets are buildings around that could be used as a landmark.

The transporter was opened from the outside, even more armed police-forces were visible all around. One person after another left the transporter, the Aliens first, so that the troops outside could take over. Then some of the GSG9-specialists helped Joker outside and a bit later Shepard and the rest followed.

Joker took a look around and smirked when he noticed all the trees: He was right about them being a forest, which made him even more confident that his calculations were right.

Their group slowly started moving towards a large flat building, which was covered by trees as Jeff noted, probably to conceal the area from satellites or planes. After the leader from the MAD had verified his identity at the entrance they followed inside and down a long hall, sometimes stopping to go through additional security checks. At one point they even had to step through several scanners, and everyone was frisked for hidden weapons. They even went as far as replacing Jeff's wheelchair with a different one, as they didn't have the time to tear it apart, to search for explosives.

After this they didn't have to through any additional security checks, instead they entered a huge elevator, large enough to probably even transport some vehicles. They went down several floors and stopped at floor -4, when they door opened a large laboratory became visible. Their group took a few steps before a scientist came running towards them, at a speed that made Jeff worry that he wouldn't be able to stop and make him collide with their group.

Luckily enough the scientist started slowing down soon enough, and after he had caught enough breath to speak again he quickly turned towards the aliens and a smile entered his face.

"Is it them? Are those the extraterrestrials?"

The MAD-leader took a step forward so that the stood next to the scientist and turned around.

"You'll have to excuse professor Zeissner here, he is one of our experts, and he is probably..."

He didn't even get to finish before the professor had took another step and reached the aliens.

"Amazing! They look so human-like! The size, the limbs, it's absolutely unbelievable! I wonder how their faces look like, what colour their skins has. A living extraterrestrial, this has to be the best day of my life!"

Jeff had to smile, and he saw that Shepard also had a smile on her face – it was good to know that the initial reaction to non-human sentient life seemed to be mostly positive, at least from sides of the scientists, not a fearful one.

"Ah sorry that I haven't introduced myself properly yet, I'm just so exited! I am Dr. Prof. Adrian Zeissner, the expert on micro-biology in this facility, I'm here to make sure that our guests don't accidentally infect our crew with some sort of virus or bacteria our immune-system has no defense against, I'll also make sure that the same doesn't happen to the other way round, but it looks like they already have a pretty isolated environment-suit, this will safe us a lot of trouble. From what I have heard you two have are the people who discovered them then?" he pointed towards Shepard and Joker.

"You will have to undergo a medical check to see if there are any irregularities, just to be safe."

The smile on Joker's face quickly faded, medical checkups were something he would never come to like, no matter the reason.

**/ Tali's point of view /**

Tali was incredibly nervous. When the troops had put her and her crew inside the transporter she had feared that these hyumen had sold them out, but when they were also forced into the vehicle it quickly turned into a different fear: that she had maybe put those two into danger as well by accepting their help.

Her fear was not reduced when they had stepped out of the vehicle, just to see even more soldiers, guarding a large building, apparently this species had decided that the Quarians were extremely dangerous, and had to be secured accordingly. When they had entered the building and moved underground in an elevator Tali had tensed up even more. She had spend all her life on a spaceship, suddenly being surrounded by stone in every direction instead of only a thin hull, that separated her from the dark void of space made her extremely worried. She new that it was foolish, but she couldn't shake the feeling as if the ceiling above her would suddenly collapse and crush her and everyone around here under tons of rock. She was so busy checking the walls around her for cracks, that she didn't notice the hyumen in white clothes until he stopped right in front of her and started inspecting her from different angles, which made her almost jump from surprise. The man started talking in their language and made some gestures towards the female and male who had helped her out, then he turned around and walked towards a door, both of them following him. After a short moment Tali decided that they should probably also follow them, if not the armed men in black around them would stop them, but when they also started moving towards the door she knew that she had understood correctly.

Behind the door was a room, that was completely white aside from some medical equipment and furniture, which had a light green hue. She watched as the red-furred female sat down and stretched out her arm, while the man in white searched for something, He then turned around with a syringe in his hand and faced the woman. After a short inspection of her arm he put the needle into her arm and filled the syringe with red fluid from her arm. He removed the syringe and sealed her arm with some sort of sticker and proceeded to do the same with the man in his chair-vehicle. After he had finished he turned around to face the Quarians and prompted Veetor to sit down on the examination couch in the middle of the room. Veetor hesitated to do so, apparently afraid of the person, and of what he would do to them.

Tali noticed that the pair (she had decided to call her hyumen helpers from the beginning the pair for simplicities sake) started talking to the man in white, pointing towards her and the Quarians. The man in white listened and then simply laughed, before removing a tool from one of the tables next to him.

Veetor, still afraid of the man took a few steps backwards. Tali didn't like seeing him like this, so she took a deep breath and stepped forwards instead.

* * *

_I'm sorry for the cliffhanger, or wait, I'm not._

_I like cliffhangers ;)_

_What about you? Do YOU like cliffhangers? Write a review if you do, write a review if you don't ^^_

_On a serious note: Someone asked if 'Jeff' is a typical German name, and the answer: No, absolutely not. That's why I decided to shed a bit of light onto the past of Joker, I hope you found it interesting._

_Someone of you might have wondered why Shepard would simply follow these guys into the transporter, that's why I'll explain the situation real quick:_

_The MAD itself is, like all other German intelligence services, not allowed to arrest or question people. The reason for this is, that most of their work is classified, and to prevent these organisations to become too powerful, only the police is allowed to arrest and question people in Germany, their work not being classified most of the time. That's why they brought the GSG9 along: The GSG9 or "GSG9 der Bundespolizei" (GSG9 of the federal police), GSG9 meaning '"Grenzschutzgruppe 9" (border protection group 9) in the past, is a group similar to the SWAT-teams in America, who are essentially police-officers trained for hostage-situations, anti-terror-fights and other situations, which are too dangerous for normal police units. As part of the police they are allowed to arrest and question people._

_Hope that made everything a bit easier to understand, if you've got questions, feel free to ask._

_See ya next chapter_

_~Yaesephir_


	6. Worst case scenario

**Chapter 6: Worst case scenario**

**/Shepard's point of view/**

Shepard was surprised to see one of the female aliens to volunteer for the position, apparently she was the leader of the group and wanted to protect her crew.

They had told Prof. Zeissner about how important the suits seemed to these people, and that damaging it with a syringe was most likely not a good idea, but she was relieved when he had simply laughed and explained that he would start with some simple ultrasound examinations and other non-invasive tests, which wouldn't put his patients into danger.

He then turned around to the evidently nervous alien and started to smear contact-gel on her suit, so that the ultrasound-scan could provide clearer results.

"This might take a while, I have to make ultrasound-checks, x-ray tomography, MRI, EEG, and all of this for multiple people, maybe I can even find out a way to reseal this suits, this way I could do minimal-invasive scans... Anyway, you should probably go on, I think there are some things that the superiors want to discuss with you, and you shouldn't keep them waiting."

The glance the MAD-leader threw into her direction underlined his last sentence. Shepard shuddered a bit at the thought of what would happen to them after these people knew what they wanted from them, but then again they had said that they weren't even under arrest. Could it be a lie to lure them into a false sense of security? She took another look at the group of GSG9 that were still waiting for them to stand up and follow them. No, a false sense of security was only helpful if you had to expect heavy resistance and you needed every edge you could get in combat, but her and Jeff weren't trained soldiers, sure, she had a G5-patch in Krav Maga, which would probably be enough to take down one or two people if she wanted to, but would also end with her being riddled with bullets, a highly undesirable state.

She stood up and started to push Jeff and his wheelchair back to the door they entered from (the wheelchair they had given him was not an electric one, and she didn't want him to hurt his arms by pushing it himself). Their group went back to the elevator, leaving behind the extraterrestrials with the scientist, who proceeded with his examinations on the now a bit more relaxed female alien. They entered the elevator and went down three additional floors. Johanna started to wonder what they needed such a large and deep facility for, she had noticed that the labels in the elevator went down all to -10, and they had only seen -4 and -7 so far. After leaving the elevator they had to go through yet another security check, where the guy from the MAD had to perform a retina-scan before they were allowed to keep moving.

They finally reached a large office, where multiple people were standing around a large table, that seemed to be a giant touchscreen-monitor, various diagrams, maps and blueprints visible. Shepard noticed that apart from the people that had just arrived almost every person in the room had at least one badge or medal visible, and that she could only recognize a small part of the badges, even with all the time she regularly spent in military simulators like Arma or reading articles on Wikipedia (yes, she was a weapon enthusiast, no point in hiding it). There was one guy with the badge of a brigadier general on his arm, and the famous KSK sword-badge on his beret, a general of the Air Force, and one of the Navy. But there were at least four other people with medals she had never seen before, or which she had seen but couldn't quite associate with anything. Those who didn't have any badges were suit and ties instead, probably politicians of some sort.

"The individuals are now present" the guy from MAD announced.

"Have they singed the NDA yet?" one of the guys in suit and tie asked.

"Not yet, we still didn't receive the paperwork." the leader answered.

"Then get it as fast as possible and let them do it, we are wasting time if we can't have them in this room."

The MAD-leader nodded, walked over to a phone in one corner of the room and started ordering around the people on the other end of the phone.

A few minutes later they had the non-disclosure-agreement ready for Johanna and Jeff to sign. It was a rather short document, that basically told them that absolutely nothing discussed in this facility was allowed to repeated in public, public being defined as everywhere other than the facility, and repeated being defined as spoken, written, symbolic, gestured or in any other way of bringing across the information they would hear withing this building.

Shepard both decided that it was most likely the best interested for their physical integrity if they signed the contract, so they did after the short time they took to read through the document. When they were done the discussion and questioning from the generals and other people in the room immediately started.

_-several hours later-_

Jeff and Johanna both were exhausted from all the questions they have had to to answer in the past hours, they had been asked to basically sum up every piece of information they had given to the aliens, and everything they had learned from them. After they had gone through everything they were asked about their opinions on the extraterrestrials, if they had given them any hint towards if they were dangerous or not, if trade-agreements with them would be possible, and many other questions they had no real answer for.

Through the course of the questions Shepard had learned that there were multiple people around who had been given the task to run through different scenarios of the outcome.

For one there was the Chief of Federal Armed Forces Staff, Sebastian Stahlberg, responsible for the scenario of a hostile resolution with the extraterrestrials, or simply put: How to fight a war against aliens. He had asked lots of questions on how the suits of these creatures could maybe be used for their advantage, as they seemed to be dependent on it.

The general of the Navy, Shepard had already forgotten his name, was responsible for the scenario of a non-violent solution for some reason, and had been asking for ways how they could maybe improve and simplify the communication between the races.

Then there was Sabine Lehens, representative of the Ethics Committee, who didn't represent any scenario, but was in charge of – who would've thought – the ethics behind interactions with this new species. If a war was inevitable, what measures would be acceptable? If a peaceful solution was possible, would they have to tell the population since they had a right to know, or was it better for their own good to keep it a secret?

The Brigadier General of the KSK was putting together information, whether an interaction with this new race was even desirable. He kept running 'what if'-scenarios that all basically came down to if it was better for humanity to step into contact with this species, or if they should simply hide, until they were better prepared.

There were some more people, who ran through simulations on what possible impact the news of a different race alone could have on economy, culture, how humanity could adjust their political systems and laws to work with non-human beings, others prepared for situations on how other nations would react if Germany would mobilize their army for no apparent reason. Shepard was still astonished on how fast the government had put together this task force, the crash had only happened yesterday, and now they were already in a large complex, running extensive scenarios like these. When she thought about it, she more and more got the feeling that the politicians maybe didn't have their hand in this, and were yet to be informed about what had happened. If the MAD and the other intelligence agencies had organized this on their own it would explain the fast results, but the presence of a representative of the ethics committee didn't seem like something the MAD waste their time with.

In the end it didn't really matter who had made it work the way it did, as long as it worked.

Joker and Shepard had both been dismissed after the task-force had run out of questions to ask, and now they were resting in the hallway that led to the office they had been in before. Joker had lifted himself from his wheelchair into a couch that stood in the corridor, next to a water dispenser, and Shepard in return had taken over his wheelchair and tried to balance herself in it, without the two smaller wheels in front touching the floor.

"Hey Joy? What are you going to do when all of this is over?" Joker asked her, staring at the ceiling from his lying position.

"After what is over? This meeting here or the whole alien-thingy?" she asked in return.

"Both I guess."

"Hmm... didn't really have time to think about it yet. But I guess I'll drop out of university."

"...why?"

"Well, as I see it there are two large outcomes: War or peace. If it's peace, we will probably learn a lot from this species, and every bit of knowledge I learned in university will be outdated, complete and utterly useless. If it's war then a diploma won't save me from a bullet or starvation, most likely I would even be one of the first to check out the carrots from below, can't say I have a lot of real-world skills to speak of. So I should maybe join the army or something. It's most likely be a job useful in both scenarios."

Jeff simply continued to stare at the ceiling.

"What about you? What will you do?" Shepard asked, stopping for a second, to not lose balance with the wheelchair.

"I'm not sure. I think the only option I have is to hope for peace, since we both know how long I'd last in a war."

Shepard frowned at this. She hated to admit it, but her boyfriend was right. Normally she would be one of the first to point out that he could still do pretty much anything, even with his disease, but she was also a realist, and she knew that combat was one of these exceptions where willpower alone wasn't enough. She thought about a way to cheer him up for a bit, not sure what to say.

"And what if you become a driver or pilot? You don't have to hold a gun to be helpful you know" she finally answered. She knew that she had to be honest with him, and these were the only things that came to her mind that would be useful in a war and which he could handle. Sure, medics were also always wanted, but Jeff had a problem with the sight of blood, he also always turned down off the blood in Counter-Strike when they played it together.

"Yeah, I'd probably ace the pilot test, with the small exception that I'd probably break my whole ribcage from the g-force when doing maneuvers in a jet. My bones aren't strong enough yet."

"Didn't you say that the therapy should allow you to walk without wheelchair later this year or something?"

"Walking and having the pressure multiple times the gravityon earth on you are two very different things. And even if they were strong enough, I think they would put me down at the end of their list, there are enough healthy people who want to become pilots before me, and that's only now, where they don't know that those will probably used in a war yet."

"You should try anyway. Maybe start as a helicopter-pilot, and then switch to planes when you feel ready for it."

"Any particular reason you are pushing me towards becoming the pilot of a plane that much?"

"I know how much you like your flight-simulators, and also how good you are at them. Just thought it would be a good idea."

"Sure it isn't a different reason?"

Johanna stopped balancing around with the wheelchair and dropped the front-wheels down on the floor, throwing an asking glance towards Joker.

"What other reason would I have?" she asked, genuinely confused.

Joker smirked.

"I think I know for a fact that one of us likes to dress up as a stewardess when he or she thinks no-one is looking, and sure as hell it isn't me."

Shepard stopped dead in her tracks, gaping widely at Joker, her face almost instantaneously changing into a colour not entirely dissimilar to a raw steak.

Joker tried his best to hold back his laughter, but his girlfriend just looked way to embarrassed and cute for him to keep a straight face.

"Wha... whe... how?" was all Johanna managed to stammer.

"Maybe you should double-check that you really hit the 'close conversation'-button in skype before changing next time." Jeff laughed.

Shepard covered her face with her hands, she felt like the heat emitting from her face would soon melt the floor below her, so that she'd drop down to floor -8. The outfit was a stupid idea she had had for Jeff's birthday, but in the end she had been too embarrassed to do it, and had returned the uniform to the store she had gotten it from. To think that he had seen her striking poses in the outfit was almost too much to bear. Joker in the meantime couldn't stop laughing, he loved teasing her like this.

"I guess that also answers what you want to do after the whole alien-thingy is over" he chuckled. "I knew there was a different reason why you didn't want me to call them latexians."

Shepard in the meanwhile started to think that being wiped out by an alien race might not be as a horrible fate as she had thought in the beginning.

**/ Tali's point of view /**

Tali shivered. She had just left the cold pool of water the man in white had asked her to step into, and even though the suit was really isolating, it didn't help when someone tried deliberately to cool down someone body temperature. From the screens she could see in the laboratory it looked like the pool was used in combination of heat-cameras to determine how the blood was flowing inside the body of a Quarian. She was still surprised from the ingenuity these hyumen showed when working around problems like the suit she was in. Over the course of hours the man had put her and her crew through dozens of tests, not a single one visibly damaging the suit, which was relieving to know. But Tali knew that one of them would have to open their suit sooner or later, to allow the scientist to perform more accurate tests, that would help them understand that the biology of their species was fundamentally different, even if they looked surprisingly similar.

She really hoped that it wouldn't be too late, they only had left emergency-rations for two more days, and in her current position the initial plan of building an emergency-beacon or manipulating the satellites of this species was no longer possible. But fear for the life of her crew and her own wasn't the only thing she felt: She also felt guilt. Guilt to have possibly sent the two members of this species that had helped her into their death, simply by being dependent on them. They soldiers had separated the pair from the Quarians some hours ago, and had later returned – without them.

* * *

_Hello again, Yaesephir with another chapter._

_[Edited]: Blablabla, lengthy explanation about why I didn't deliver chapter on time._

_Did I mention anything specific this chapter I have to explain? Hm, maybe briefly, I did mention the KSK, it's the abbreviation for 'Kommando Spezialkräfte' (commando special forces), which is the German elite-troop, used in other countries. Similar to the GSG9 they handle dangerous and out-of-the-ordinary situations, the main difference being that they are part of the Bundeswehr and not the police, so that they can't arrest people. The identity of KSK soldiers are top secret, every single pictures where they appear on gets redacted or heavily censored, and even after successful operations the details on what happened during the operations stays secret._

_I also mentioned some names of different generals, and before you ask: No, those are not the real names of current generals. While the names of current generals are known to the public, and my story isn't set too far into the future, so that they could still be in command, I decided act like other people are in this position, because I do not know anything about these people, and I don't want to to make real people part of my story, especially not in a possible war-scenario, because in situations harsh decisions have to be made, and I am in no position to imply that the real people would make decisions like the ones my characters are taking._

_I also briefly mentioned that Shepard learned Krav Maga. Those unfamiliar with the term: Krav Maga is a close-combat/self-defense system developed by the Israel military, which combines multiple other martial arts, to achieve maximal effectiveness in real combat situations. Krav Maga has become increasingly popular as a martial art, and can be learned in almost every country, just like other martial arts like Karate, Taekwondo and so on. In Israel Krav Maga uses a belt-system to show your level of expertise, just like many other martial arts, but there is another system used in international Krav Maga associations, based on patches. It starts with the P-patches (P standing for practitioner), moving up to G-patches (G standing graduate) to finally the E-patches (E standing for expert). The patches are numbered from 1 to 5, one being the lowest, 5 the highest. The G5-patch is the last one before the expert-patches start, and the one Shepard is holding. Most civilian Krav Maga instructors hold a G-Patch, the E-Patches are mostly held by military instructors, just to put into perspective of what Shepard had to go through to get to the G5-level. Why exactly I made Shepard in my story go through a Krav Maga course? Simple: The N7-program doesn't even exist yet, and Shepard didn't have any reason to join some special forces like in the original game, since she doesn't have any traumatic background, so I had to find other ways to ensure that she becomes one of the best later._

_Anyway, I think that's enough trivia for today, so see ya whenever the next chapter is finished._

_~Yaesephir._


	7. The third day

_Hi everyone, Yaesephir again!_

_Someone suggested that I might speed things up a little bit. I know that this story might look a bit boring at a first glance, but mostly for people who dislike reading about politics. I know, in the games it's always the politicians that get absolutely nothing done, but exactly this fascinates me: to see history in the making. And no matter what people try to tell you, a lot more history is made my decisions of boring politicians than by small groups of people who run around with guns and shoot at things. If you are not really into this whole "slow action"-thingy (how I like to call it), then maybe this fic isn't the right one for you. (I edited the AN of the first chapter to include this information, so hopefully no one is surprised by this at this point)._

_You shouldn't mistake this as a "Hey it's my opinion/writing style"-argument, that is often used to deflect any form of criticism, in this case I just didn't find the particular review extremely helpful. If you DO want me something to change then you should maybe explain WHY you want me to change it. Important here is that I will only listen to reviews with the 'why' explained, not ones that only have a 'how to do it better', the reason being that it's still my fanfic, not everything has to go the way you want it._

_But to show you that I CAN learn from reviews I decided to speed this chapter up a bit. Not sure if it worked, you tell me._

* * *

**Chapter 7: The third day**

**/ Shepard's point of view | two days after the crash /**

Shepard dodged just in time to escape the fist that had been aimed at her head. A quick move from her hand and she had grabbed the arm punching at her, ready to use his own momentum against him, but the man was faster: He immediately changed the direction of his blow, so instead of throwing him over his shoulder Johanna instead directly moved his punch into her stomach. She gasped as the power of the punch forced the air out of her lungs, but she didn't even get to catch a breath as the man moved his arm into the opposite direction and used his spin to hit her with his leg directly into her back. Shepard collapsed on the floor in pain, but rolled to her side fast enough to see the foot of the soldier moving towards her head from above. She crossed both of her arms as fast as she could and pulled them from her stomach to above her head, catching the heel of the man between the arms and quickly stretching them, forcing the man to take a huge step forwards to not lose his balance. She then quickly retracted her still crossed arms and brought them down on the knee of his other leg, swinging the man around like he had just tried to make a backflip from his forward-leaning position, only for him to crash on his back. She used the velocity of the guy to pull herself over him. The man pulled up his arms just in time to deflect the flat hands of the woman above him, who had tried to hit both of his ears at the same time. He stretched out his legs from below her and clutched her, punched his left arm towards her face, but instead punched past her and quickly angled his arm behind her neck, his right arm shooting up below her chin. Then he rolled to the side without moving his arms and positioned himself above her. His legs still entangled around her, his weight on top of her and his arms in a perfect position to break her neck he stopped moving. His eyes met hers and after catching a quick breath he opened his mouth:

"One, two, three, over."

Then he relaxed his leg-lock, lowered his arms and pushed himself up.

"That should be enough for now, you certainly got some skills girl."

Shepard slowly sat up straight, every single fibre of muscle in her body hurting like hell.

"Not enough, if this had been a real fight I'd be dead." she answered after her heart had stopped pumping like it was about to explode.

"What did you expect, to take down someone with twenty years of combat experience with a bit of Krav Maga?" the instructor chuckled. "You should be proud of yourself, most of our recruits don't even last three minutes, you managed whole eight minutes."

"In real combat eight minutes might not be fast enough" Shepard frowned.

"In real combat you either shoot the enemy or you arrest him, if it comes to hand-to-hand combat you have done something wrong to begin with."

Shepard gladly caught the bottle of water Jeff had thrown over to her from the side of the training-ground, almost struggling to open it since her hands were still shaking.

After the discussion with Jeff the day before she had decided that it would be best to directly take the opportunity when so many people from the GSG9 and KSK were around her and had applied for a job. Under normal circumstances she would've had to run through lots of evaluations, background checks, interviews and similar, but the fact that she already knew about the threat they had to prepare for put her into a special position, and so the formalities had been cut short for her. The fact that she already had training in hand-to-hand combat was definitely a huge plus as well, so was the information that she knew most standard military tactics from military-simulations. Of course a videogame couldn't even come close to the original, but in this case it would save a lot of time, since she could skip basic training like hand-signs, abbreviations, chain of command and similar stuff. What she was now going through was more or less a shortened version of her evaluation, where she had to prove that she really had what it took to fight.

Jeff on the other hand had stayed in the complex since he had nothing else to do and because he was curious about what would happen to the aliens, something he hoped to find out more about by sticking around.

"Way to go Joy, forcing your boyfriend watching you being groped by other men, you sure that you're not doing this because it turns you on?" Joker snickered.

Johanna tried to laugh, but immediately stopped it when her ribcage started hurting from it.

"Hey, either this or making you last eight minutes against him" she answered with a grin on her face.

"As if this leg-lock of him would work against a wheelchair."

**/ Rael'Zorah's point of view /**

"Admiral, the exploration-vessel just contacted us again."

Rael'Zorah instantaneously recoiled in his chair, dropping his report and bringing down his finger on the touchscreen so fast, that he would've broken the keyboard if it hadn't been a hologram.

"What did they say?" he shouted at the screen, making the Quarian on the other end of the transmission jump in surprise.

"They... they request a direct connection, they say they have found information not meant for everyone to hear."

"Granted, please reconnect them to my office, I'll be ready in a second."

The admiral didn't even wait for his subordinate to answer, instead he jumped out of his chair and dashed towards the door of his office and sealed it. No matter how worried he was about his daughter right now, a confidential transmission was even more worrisome. The Quarians had a great need for being organized, so not sending up a message through the chain of command meant trouble most of the time. After Rael had double-checked that the door was locked he ran back to his desk, just in time to see the face of a different Quarian appear on the screen in front of him.

"Admiral Zorah, Khin'Zaru vas Omony reporting, Admiral, we have found eezo-traces."

Rael'Zorah's heart skipped a beat when he heard these news, his mood immediately coming to a new low when he saw how tense the reporting marine was.

"And, have you found the ship? Are they alive? And what did you need a confidential transmission for?"

Khin'Zaru hesitated, obviously at a loss of words on how to describe what he wanted to say next. Finally he spoke up:

"Sir, we followed the e-zero-traces, but it looks like their ship... crashed onto a planet. I'm sorry Admiral."

Rael froze in place, the immense pain he had felt in his heart for the last days suddenly vanishing, leaving behind nothing but a damp feeling of emptiness. He felt like all energy had been washed out of his body, the face behind his mask turning absolute neutral, his eyes not even strong enough anymore to build tears. Time itself might as well have stopped, for him it would make no difference.

Silence filled the room, a heavy silence that made him want to fall on his knees, but he didn't even have the energy left to do that much, so he simply stood, stood in his office, the death of his only daughter pushing down on him.

The marine held his breath, fearing that another word from him would make the Admiral collapse, so he also simply stood with lowered head, waiting minute after minute for Rael'Zorah to say something. After a few minutes the Admiral started to move again and turned his back to the screen.

"So there's that. Was there something else you wanted to report?" Rael'Zorah asked, making the marine shudder from the complete absence of emotion in his voice.

"Yes... yes Admiral, there was something else. We wanted to land on the planet to check if there were any survivors from the crash, so we increased the sensitivity of our sensors to pinpoint the exact location where they had landed. At first we thought it was an error, but we checked again, then we decreased the sensitivity again to make sense of all the junk-data we were getting, and..."

"Did you find them or not?" Rael'Zorah interrupted him.

Khin slowly shook his head, taken aback from the rudeness of the Admiral, but he could understand him, losing someone so near to you would most definitely leave a large emotional scar.

"No, it's not about us finding them or not. It's about us finding something different than we had expected."

Rael'Zorah slowly turned around again, but he did not speak a single word and simply waited until the marine started talking again.

"We had a few problems finding the ship by simply tuning our sensors to search for eezo-emissions, so we added search-parameters for radiowaves and similar signals as well, so that we could maybe find them using their omnitools. But we didn't get a single result – we got billions. Sir, the planet is inhabited, and it's not by a species we know of: None of the signals match any specifications known to us."

Rael's heart slowly started beating again, at least he could feel the void inside him slowly getting replaced of the feeling of blood rushing through him.

They hadn't found their bodies. They had not been able to confirm whether they were dead or not yet. Maybe Tali was still alive and simply couldn't send a message because all the signals on this planets scrambled their emergency-beacon like some sort of strong white-noise? The possibility was small, but it was there, and that was all he needed. He would hold onto this this single flame of hope that had reignited within him and would not let it go, even if it would burn him alive, nothing in the world would stop him from trying to save his daughter, if she was still alive out there.

"A unknown species you say?" Rael asked, the fire in his eyes almost visible even on the ouside.

"Yes sir."

"Okay marine, Khin'Zaru was your name, right?"

"Yes sir."

"You are hereby asked to initiate contact with this race and confirm whether there were any survivors or not, the first-contact-package is pre-installed on your ships mainframe, if not simply get the newest version from the citadel databases, reinforcements will be sent to assist you as soon as possible."

Khin's eyes widened when he heard what he has just been asked to do, and he was about to object before Rael interrupted him again.

"This is a direct order, you are now answering to ME. Understood?"

Zaru shivered. He had a bad feeling about this.

**/ European Space Agency /**

"Timon, can you get the fuck over here?"

The engineer slowly turned his chair around to face his colleagues, not lowering the report he was reading.

"What do you need?"

"The boss wants us all in the conference room, and he said immediately, so as long as you don't do any experiments right now that could possible kill the whole agency if you leave it unattended, you are to come with us right now."

Timon simply raised his eyebrow, laid down the report on his table and left his chair. A conference like this normally meant that they had found new private investors, who wanted certain information from one of their many satellites, so they all had to attend in the conference room to give the clients the feeling that their money was put to good use (or simple: they had to look busy). Private contracts didn't happen very often though, as they got most of their work from the different governments in Europe. So when they reached the conference room he was surprised that his colleague hadn't exaggerated: Almost the entire facility-personal was present, something that didn't even happen in some of the biggest contracts they had so far. He took a few looks around, grabbed a chair and sat down, right in time for the lights in the room to get dimmed. The large screen on the wall flared to live, and Timon – as the rest of the room – were surprised to see the Federal Chancellor of Germany on the other end of the screen. He was even more surprised when the Chancellor didn't even wait for the ESA-president to explain what this conference was about, but instead immediately started talking:

"Good evening, you are most likely wondering what this conference is about, so I'll jump straight to the point: The Federal Republic of Germany has decided to increase the funding for the ESA."

Timon almost fist-pumped below his desk as he heard this – Germany was already the most important funder of their agency, 25% of their yearly bills were paid by them. With the now announced increase of funding his job was safe for a while.

"We are proud to announce that the current annual budget contributed by the Federal Republic of Germany will be increased from 790 million..."

The atmosphere in the room tensed, the funding of their program had steadily increased, but not so much that a conference had been necessary. Everyone in the room hoped that the budget would be enough for new equipment, most important obviously in the field the respective person was working in. Timon smiled, a small increase would already be enough to get him some of the newer 3d-printers he had requested so often, which would make his work in the engineering-department so much easier. And maybe they would finally get enough to build a new production-facility, sometimes they had blueprints ready faster than they could produce at the moment.

"...to 1.6 billion euros."

The whole room went silent, someone dropped his mug on the floor and the cup shattering could be heard. No-one dared to speak, still trying to process what they had just heard. A budget-increase of over 800 million euros, out of nowhere. Timon could see that the president of the agency seemingly had also not known the exact amount up until know, his jaw had dropped just like the mug from the guy before. After a few seconds the president had caught himself and closed his mouth again, quickly shook himself and stared on the screen.

"Excuse me, but I think we had just some sort of connection issues. Did you just say one-point-six-billion euros?"

The chancellor simply nodded.

"That is correct. The budget will be available retroactive to start with the first of this month. We will also try to convince the other nations like France to increase the budget as well."

His gaze turned even more serious than it already was.

"We have neglected the potential of space-travel long enough, time to change this once and for all. You have one year, then we want another man on the moon – and this time he'll bring a colony along."

**/ Shepard's point of view | four hours later /**

Shepard stared at the TV-screen in shock. It had only been three days in total, the first one included, since she had met the aliens, and she had known from the first moment that it would change her life dramatically. She had not expected for it to happen so fast. She looked over to Jeff, who was sitting next to her, back in his old wheelchair, which he had received back after they had left the facility. Since they had already told the Generals everything they had known about the extraterrestrials they had been dismissed, and true to word been allowed back home without being arrested. At first both of them had wondered why the government apparently didn't care that two people ran around that could possibly leak the information about non-human sentient life. But now they knew: with everything that was happening no-one would have time to listen to them anyway. Johanna turned back to the screen, Joker firmly squeezing her hand, entirely focused on the message on the screen:

"This is the emergency-broadcast-system, please stand by. The message will be broadcasted in forty seconds. Family-members and neighbours are to be informed. Do not try to change the sender. This is not a test. This is the emergency-broadcast-system, please..."

A voice read the message over and over, it's calmness in stark contrast to this whole situation represented. Shepard had only switched on the TV to relax a bit after the whole stress of the last days, only for the program to get cut off by this message. Then the sirens had started howling, Shepard had tried to call her mother but the phone networks were already unreachable from all the calls.

"...message will be broadcasted in thirty seconds. Family-members and neighbours are to be informed. Do not try to change the sender. This is not a test. This is..."

The grip around her hand got tighter and tighter, and normally she would have complained that it hurt, but right now she needed him really close to her, so she didn't say anything as her hand started to hurt from the pressure of his hands. His knuckles already started to turn white, and she began to wonder if this was more painful for him or her.

"...neighbours are to be informed. Do not try to change the sender. This is not a test. This is the emergency-broadcast-system, please stand by. The message will be broadcasted in ten seconds."

Shepard noticed that the message on the monitor changed, now it only said "Emergency broadcast" on top, a countdown in the middle and "Not a test" on the bottom of the screen. She noticed how the grip around her hand was still strong, but now a little less painful. She also noticed that even though Jeff was as nervous as her his hands didn't shake.

"Three. Two. One.

Emergency broadcast now live.

Do not leave the room. Do not try to change the sender.

This is not a test."

Then the text disappeared and was replaced by a grainy video of an office that almost looked identical to the one she and Jeff had met the generals the day before. But instead of the generals it was the chancellor sitting at the desk, his expression rock-solid and serious, a sight not familiar to anyone who only knew him from the election posters, where he could be seen with a warm smile on his face.

"People of Germany, this is Tobias Bruhn, Federal Chancellor of the Federal Republic of Germany. This is an official statement in the name of the German government, approved by the Federal President, with approval pending from the Federal Parliament. This is a declaration of emergency, unknown aggressors have managed to breach into the airspace of our country, to protect the population from harm I find myself forced to declare a state of emergency. Decisions will now not be approved by the Federal Parliament or Federal Council anymore, the Joint Committee is now responsible. The army is in standby state as of now and will operate within our own borders. You are asked to remain within your house or to seek shelter. We are not, I repeat, we are NOT at war with another nation, and we are requesting support from our friends and allies France to..."

Shepard turned pale, how bad was the situation when they had already have to ask for the assistance of a another country?

* * *

_I think I don't have to explain this chapter, maybe I have to mention one thing though:_

_You probably noticed that in my story "Angie" Merkel isn't the Federal Chancellor of Germany, and that's because (like I explained in the last chapter) I dislike including really existing, living people into my story. I don't have any problem with historical figures, but if the person is still alive I will not include him/her._

_Other than that: You probably don't have to learn every name I mention in my story, e.g. Timon from the ESA: sometimes I simply have to add a character to allow me to write about a certain event, and I don't like writing about a scene without mentioning the name of the person, because the result of that will always either be boring, since I have to repeat 'person' all the time, or it will look too mysterious, so that people could get the idea that the whole scene is very important._

_On how I decide what name to give my characters: I simply take something that (hopefully) doesn't break the flow of the story. I don't want any extremely common names, as they tend to look weird in stories. On the other hand I don't want to invent new names, just to make the character super special. In this case I simply thought "European Space Agency? Hey, any European name will do. What country should this guy be from then? Eeny, meeny, miny, moe, Greece it is. Not common but also not entirely weird Greek name? Ah, Timon!" and there I had my character._

_So what do you think? Names for unimportant people? No names? Names but somehow show the reader if a person is important or not?_

_~Yaesephir_


	8. Solutions

**Chapter 8: Solutions**

_Hi everyone, sorry for the delay, but I had a few ideas for future chapters and wanted to plan them out before writing another normal chapter, to make sure that I can start pushing the story towards certain events._

_One of these future events will most likely be about who the "final boss" will be, because it won't be the reapers._

_What? No reapers? But why?_

_The answer is simple: the reapers are a really really bad designed enemy. They are simply evil, their motivation is never really explained, you can't sympathy with them. There are good 'final bosses' in the original game. Saren is more or less a tragic figure, he only wanted to protect the citadel races from certain extinction and decided that maybe enslavement (giving up to the reapers) was the better option. Benezia was a good enemy, because she was evil against her will, and when you killed her you had to deal with the aftermath (Liara, though there wasn't much to be dealt with, she simply accepted it). The whole idea of indoctrination is good, but the reapers aren't. That's why I decided to get rid of them and use a different conflict instead. I will not reveal how I got rid of them though, maybe they never existed, maybe they were already killed in a different cycle, maybe there is a different source of indoctrination, maybe they changed their strategy, who knows?_

_I think that's enough for author's comments for now, let's get going:_

* * *

**/ Berlin, Reichstag Building | 4th day /**

Loud conversations could be heard in the press-conference-room, everyone was on edge after the announcement of the state of emergency the day before. Reporters from all over the world had arrived to be the first to find out what exactly had happened, nervous if they would witness the beginning of a third world war. The day before had been eventful:

After the announcement that Germany was mobilizing their military against an unknown enemy, every other country in Europe had also put their army on highest level of alert. Parliaments all around the world had started discussions whether a preventive first-strike against Germany should be considered, and if not for the president of France the whole situation could have quickly turned into a nightmare for every living being on this continent. Even the USA and Russia had announced that they would not hesitate to launch nuclear weapons, if Germany decided to start yet another war, put to everyone's surprise they made another announcement only two hours after their first one, that a crisis-meeting had been requested by the German government.

No-one was sure what to expect of this conference, especially after suddenly almost every country in Europe had declared at once that the president or a similar high representative of the respective nation would be present at the press-conference, either in person or via live-transmission.

The whole room was overcrowded, as the government had overruled any safety-regulations to allow as many reporters to attend the meeting as possible. Live-streams and broadcasts had been installed to allow every person in the EU to watch this conference, and the technicians were still working on setting up additional servers, so that the whole meeting could be streamed to the rest of the world over the internet, without the servers collapsing.

The tension in the room was so heavy, it almost felt like the air could turn solid in any given moment. Jets cycled over the city, soldiers secured the roofs and anti-aircraft-batteries could be seen all around.

The reporters in the room got louder and louder, everyone sharing their thoughts on the situation with the other people in the room, what could possibly justify the sudden amount of military presence in the city and all over Germany.

Then suddenly the Federal Chancellor, Federal President, several ministers and other politicians entered the room, followed by a large number of generals, soldiers and other people. Then the presidents or representatives of the other countries entered the room, the screens that had been installed for this meeting flared to live and revealed the faces of all the leaders that didn't come in person, including the President of the United States of America, the Russian President and the Premier of China.

The noise in the conference room died almost immediately, except for a few reporters who still thought they could somehow get some questions of their own answered before the conference had officially started, a tactic they seemed to keep on using, no matter that it had never worked in the recorded history of mankind.

It became even more obvious how cramped the whole room was, when politicians and everyone started to sit down, centimeters apart from each other, so that everyone could get a seat.

After even the last stubborn reporter had closed his mouth the Chancellor activated the microphone in front of him and started talking:

"To everyone present, you are surely asking why we invited this many people and what exactly forced us into declaring a state of emergency. To repeat what I already told some reporters yesterday and I also told the whole population in the emergency-broadcast: We are NOT at war, and there will also be no declaration of war towards any nation.

Four days ago an event occurred that hit us totally unprepared, our specialists are still working on solutions on how to react to it. A satellite crashed in Germany, we were glad that no-one got killed by the crash, but we still wanted to find out who was responsible for the satellite-crash: It was none of our own, and not a single nation had warned us about any defect satellites, which is standard-protocol, to ensure that the nation in which the satellite comes down has time to evacuate the area. We were surprised when our experts find out that it wasn't a GPS-satellite."

Whispers could be heard in the conference room again, reporters hectically typing on their laptops to be the first to release the news on twitter or the live-tickers of their company. Speculations started whether it was a secret military-satellite or some sort of prototype, since it not being a normal one seemed important.

"Our experts searched the satellite for any evidence from what nation it could be, but it become clear pretty fast that this object was not made by human hands."

The eyes of every person in the room widened at the implication, only the politicians and generals stayed relatively calm, since they had been briefed in advance. Then the Chancellor confirmed what everyone already knew from his previous statement:

"Ladies and Gentleman – we are not alone."

And hell broke loose in the building.

…

_-later-_

…

To say the following hours had been exiting would've been an understatement: As soon as the news got out, that an alien vessel had crashed on earth and that the news were not a hoax, several things hat happened: Every stock on the market even remotely related to space-travel, military and similar suddenly exploded in price, the stocks for companies developing technologies for renewable energy soon after, after an expert at the press-conference had noted that modern propulsion-engines were a problem, since you couldn't transport large amounts of fossil fuel in space, at least not at affordable prices. Conspiracy-forums saw a sudden increase in user-numbers, as the "tinfoil-hat people" now suddenly didn't seem as crazy as they used to be, the press conference continued with lots of half-truths, to prevent the public from becoming aware that there had been aliens on board of the vessel, and that they had been contacted by a second vessel out of earth's atmosphere days after the first crash. Sentences like "when our experts found the wreck no life was on board" (which was true, since the aliens were in the house of a civilian at that point) and "A way to master the enormous amounts of time needed to come from one planet to another could possibly be solved by using fully automated spaceships without organic crew, similar to drones we use today" were presented one after another, to prevent people from even asking if living aliens had been found. The following days weren't different:

The ground-forces all over the world relaxed, as the crisis of a possible third world war had been resolved (only to be replaced by a possible conflict where infantry wouldn't be of much help), countries approved of budget-increases for space agencies, experts all over the world started brainstorming over the possible implications of this discovery, petitions were created to force different governments to release all information about past UFO-sightings, the amount of applications to the military skyrocketed all around the world. The republican and democratic party in the USA decided to suggest one candidate for the upcoming election together, in case they both agreed to relinquish on proposing any changes in politics that are not needed for preparations for possible contact (hostile or not) with alien lifeforms.

And somewhere deep within a MAD facility five aliens ate their last emergency rations.

**/ Prof. Adrian Zeissner's point of view /**

With a scream of frustration Professor Zeissner threw the report on the table. Days had gone by and he still didn't know how to feed his patients. He had noticed them eating some sort of paste, and after a bit of analysis he had also found out what this paste was made of. The problem was that it was dextro-rotary, just like the aliens themselves (a fact that had surprised him when he had finally found a way to extract a blood-sample from them without permanently damaging their suit), which caused a huge problem: They had absolutely nothing they could give them to eat. There were ways to artificially convert proteins found on earth or even artificially create new ones to fit the needs of the aliens, the problem was that there was no way to do it on a large enough scale to feed someone with it, let alone five people. Even if he had the funds to build a large enough production-facility to allow a production on a scale large enough, he would never get it finished before his patients starved to death. But what frustrated him the most were the reports from his colleagues:

A few days ago they had received reports from the ESA that another alien vessel had started orbiting around earth and sent messages. With this they know knew that Earths location was no longer a secret to whatever galactic society was out there – and it was important that they found out what intentions this aliens had as soon as possible. But days had gone by and they hadn't even found out whether the messages were text-messages, audio or video yet. And that frightened everyone. What if the aliens were so advanced from a biological point of view that the human race was almost mentally retarded in comparison? What if they couldn't decrypt the message fast enough and the aliens started an invasion because they thought that 'ignoring' them was disrespectful? And what if they only wanted to help the members of their race and couldn't, because we didn't allow them to land? The biology-department, the chemistry-department, the cryptography-department – all of them had failed so far, and it looked like the only department making steady progress was the one for engineering, since they had already managed to reverse-engineer multiple technologies from the burned shipwreck. It was astonishing what could be recovered from this large piece of metal. So little usable resources in this whole thing it was...

Zeissner's eyes widened. There it was, the solution to his problem. He had spent way too much time focusing on what WASN'T usable, that he had completely overlooked what they maybe could use: There were dextro-rotary proteins on earth, but most of the time they were surrounded buy levo-rotary ones, which made them unusable, and in the case of the his patients even poisonous (or sure to ensure an allergic reaction). But what if he only focused on the usable ones, or to be more precise, if he focused only on the unusable ones, and how to remove them? What if he simply bypassed their normal digestive system, which still tried to use the whole food, and poisoned itself in the process, and implemented an artificial one instead, that simply removed the levo-rotary proteins in a harmless reaction? Sure, he wouldn't be able to get his hands on every nourishment needed this way, but it would probably be enough to prevent them from starving, and the damage to their health would be a problem which would build up way slower, so that he had more time to find maybe better solutions.

More time – Zeissner started wondering how much more time they had left when he repeated his own sentence to himself. He didn't know much about what was going on outside the facility at the moment, since he hadn't left the facility since his patients had arrived, and he didn't feel like reading the news, since every second wasted reading a newspaper could be the one second needed to find a solution in time.

Dark circles were visible under his eyes, he had pushed himself to working 18 hours a day to make the most of the time they had, with only a few breaks now and then. Some of his co-workers had asked him to sleep more, but their concern couldn't be taken really serious, as they didn't much better themselves.

The professor looked at his watch, then he decided that he had enough break time for today – back to work.

**/ Joker's point of view /**

"How much longer do you need, the connection was supposed to be up half an hour ago?"

Joker had been in the university a lot more than usual the past few days. Maybe it was because Shepard was now in a KSK training-camp and he couldn't spent time with here, maybe it was because there were better things to do than to play flight-simulators right now. He knew that Shepard was right, if a war was coming he would be most useful when in control of a plane or similar, but the problem was that he didn't have enough time to wait for his bones to become strong enough. But luckily there was a way to control an air-vehicle without being exposed to huge g-forces: Drones. While the main idea behind drones was to automate them, so that no pilot was needed, all drones could still be controlled manually via satellite-connection or different uplink. And no matter how fast the programming of a drone worked, it would never be able to work perfectly in scenarios it simply wasn't designed for. And the most obvious one in this case was the search for enemies ABOVE the drone. Since it was unlikely that he would be simply accepted into any drone-programs as pilot Joker decided to take things into his own hands, and had asked the people in the engineering-department of his university to help him design a drone of his own: Almost 360 degrees field of view by plastering it in cameras in every direction, multiple gyroscopes to make the flightpath steady no matter which direction it was flying, and a few extra concealable slots on which he planned to mount either additional cameras (maybe infrared) or weapons (if he got his hands on some and if it was needed). Building a working prototype wasn't as hard as the extremely expensive government-projects would make you believe, since the scale was a lot smaller, the technology wasn't cutting edge and they were able to skip the most complicated and expensive part, the automation of the drone. At first it looked like the largest problem would be the cost: He was a single person with the help of a few students, and cameras, gyroscopes and everything else needed all were things that had to be paid for. He was lucky that he still had quite a bit money saved up since he didn't need money most of the time (where everyone else had to spend money on fuel for their car, cigarettes or simply to visit a cinema, Jeff didn't need much, as he didn't drive, drink, smoke or visit parties). But the cost-part had quickly ceased to be a problem when the press-conference had happened: His father had received stocks of his company as part of his wage for years (this way he didn't have to pay as much taxes), and when the press conference had happened the value of these stocks had suddenly exploded and turned his dad rich. After begging him for a bit to support him with his drone-project his father had finally agreed to help him and with this he had enough money to continue his project.

The student turned around:

"Done. I had a few problems calibrating the gyroscopes, apparently the software got confused when you flipped it last time and readjusted it, falsely turning around the coordinate-system, that's why the values were negative. Connection should now be online and no longer make any problems."

Joker smiled. It was time to check out how far the prototype could be pushed, and he was sure that he would be able to push even a bit further.

* * *

_Not much to say this time, if you have questions simply ask, normally I don't bite._

_~Yaesephir_


	9. Until the end

**Chapter 9: Until the end**

_Yaesephir again, sorry for the delay, but I think I can't keep up the daily-update pace, because of reasons._

_Someone asked via PN why I didn't make Joker part of the ESA, as it's most likely that they will be the ones to build the Normandy or at least help to develop it, and I find it hard to understand that the answer isn't obvious: Joker has no qualification whatsoever to be part of the ESA. He plays flight simulators and is good at it, but that's not enough to get into a space agency or to become a pilot, if he applied with only that it would most likely be remembered as the worst application they have ever received in this particular company._

_Anyway, let's get back to the story, shall we?_

* * *

**/ Prof. Adrian Zeissner's point of view | eight days after the crash /**

"I don't know, maybe you should check if their computer-systems are even based on binary. Maybe we are missing the message because we throw away a large percentage of the message by assuming that it's only coded in on-off-states? I mean they have six fingers, maybe they based their computers around that number."

Zeissner's colleague nodded.

"That's possible, I never thought about that. I'll try it, I just hope that we get some more people for the cryptography-department soon, this is way tougher than we thought, we still haven't decrypted a single byte of it."

After looking at his watch he turned around and walked out of Zeissner's office. Immediately the professor relaxed. He was lucky that he had found an idea that fast, if his colleague had stayed any longer he might have noticed what he was doing:

The department for cryptography had been working on the transmissions for several days now and still had no idea whatsoever on what exactly the aliens tried to tell them. They took way too long, and if he hadn't come up with the artificial digestive-system for his patients then they would most likely be starving already. But he couldn't afford any more delays, he had to know what this message contained, and that's why he had decided to take matters into his own hands.

That was when he decided to leak the transmissions to the public.

It was risky, there were only a few people in this facility that had access to the transmission-recordings, and with all the security-measures in place it was most likely that they would find out who released the information sooner or later, but he wouldn't allow his patients to die, just because some politicians were too incompetent to give them enough resources to decrypt the messages in time. And in the end they wouldn't be able to keep the transmissions secret forever anyway, so this way he could at least utilize the ingenuity of people around the world to speed things up a bit. He had collected all the necessary recordings and encrypted them, now he only had to pass the information along to newspapers all around the world and sites like Wikileaks.

He was uploading the files to an external FTP-server when a colleague had entered his office, complaining about how incapable his superiors were, and had almost caught him red-handed. Now that he was alone again, Zeissner quickly checked the upload and was pleased to find it already finished. He copied the address to the server and opened the websites for many large newspapers. A few moments later he had the email-addresses he needed and copied the link together with the explanation on what the files contained he had written earlier into the email. His finger hovered over the mouse when he moved the cursor over the submit-button. Now was his last chance to turn back, to keep it a secret. It would only take a small move of his hand to prevent himself ending up like most of the other whistleblowers before him, safe him from a life in prison or on the run from his own government, away from family and friends.

The professor hesitated for a bit. Then he clicked the left mouse-button and sent the email on it's way, sealing his own fate. If he had to end up in prison to safe the first aliens on earth from certain death, then that was a price he was willing to pay.

**/ Shepard's point of view /**

"You need to calm down, you are not patient enough, you have all the time in the world to make that shot, so steady your breath, then try again."

Johanna took a glance upwards to her instructor before turning her attention back to the scope of her gun. After she had arrived in the KSK training-camp the training had started almost immediately, and she quickly learned what was expected from people who applied to the special forces. Physical exercise harsh enough to make every single muscle fibre in her body tremble was followed by tasks that demanded extremely high precision, short breaks that even got interrupted from time to time to train them always to stay alert. Her training-plans were more or less preparations for worst-case scenarios, and nothing but worst case scenarios. Tasks included rigorous training like running 20 kilometers with 40 kilograms of baggage, just to arrive at a training-site where she had to disarm bombs within a short time limit. Shooting at the shooting range in standing position for several hours on increasingly distant targets without breaks or being allowed to sit down, climbing a mountain while carrying a wounded colleague, sneaking through corridors with extremely loud obstacles (glass on the floor, rusty doors, etc.), not a single thing she did on a daily basis was ordinary training, everything had to teach her several things at once, since they didn't have the luxury of time.

Today hadn't been any different. It had started at 5 am in the morning, they had blindfolded her and her companions, then taken her to an unknown location and dropped them off via helicopter. After they had found a way back to the camp they had to swim one and a half kilometers through a freezing cold river against the water current, just to arrive at their current objective: sharpshooting over a large distance.

Shepard still trembled, they hadn't given any of them anything to dry themselves, instead they had put them directly in front of their sniper-rifle and pointed towards the aim in the distance. Johanna had already missed her first two shots, so now she tried to calm down like her superior had instructed her. She looked through the scope and aimed directly at the silhouette of the mannequin, thankful that the rifles had been adjusted in advance, so that she didn't have to worry about the bullet-drop and instead simply had to stop her hands from shaking. She cross-hair wandered over the head of the figure and she started slowing down her breath, so that the amount of time between taking a breath and releasing it increased further and further. She fully concentrated, checked the position of the cross-hair a last time and exhaled. Then she pulled back her finger slowly, making sure that she wouldn't change the position of the gun by pressing the trigger too quickly. The blow-back was immense, but she was prepared, and a great feeling of satisfaction rushed through her whole body when the head of the mannequin exploded.

She slowly stood up and looked to her instructor, who simply nodded one time.

"Okay everyone, we are done here, let's head back to the camp, rest while you are in the trucks, training will continue when we arrive."

Shepard stumbled towards the trucks and entered it, confused when she didn't find any towels. Some of the other soldiers also looked a bit confused, but no-one said a word, their instructor would surely tell them what was going on in a minute. Johanna started rubbing her arms to warm herself up a bit, with moderate success.

They were already driving for five minutes when the instructor finally contacted them via radio.

"Some of you might wonder why there are no towels on your truck to dry yourself up, the answer is simple: Today we're going to train together with the frogmen, but we won't be doing any combat diving, instead this will be for building up trust between everyone here. Normally we train you guys so hard for months and forbid any contact to your families, that you have no other choice than to start building friendships, but we might not have time for that, so my superiors decided it would be best to take the quick route."

A few confused looks were exchanged inside the truck, how was training together with the combat divers supposed to help them in trusting each other? They didn't get to think too deeply about it as the instructor continued to explain:

"You remember how we train you guys to trust your guns? That in whatever situation you will always be able to rely on the gun in your hands to get you out of the situation? We'll do something similar today. All of you belong to the best of the best, you exceeded in any form of training in the army and that's why you were recommended to the KSK, or you had the guts to walk up to one of our instructors and demand to be taken into this training, or you somehow qualified to this group on a different way. But this superiority of yours will get you guys in trouble one day if you don't realize that every person around you now is just as competent – you are no longer surrounded by fat and lazy idiots who can't get shit done themselves, you're now surrounded by the elite. And that's why you have to trust these people around you with your lives. If any of you get's asked by any of those around you to immediately jump I want you guys to jump and then ask how high, anything less will eventually lead to not only your own, but the deaths of your whole group. If any of your fellow comrades asks you to look inside his gun's barrel then you will do it and trust him with your life that he has secured his gun. And if you are in trouble you will acknowledge that those around you would also put their lives on the line just to do whatever you tell them. And exactly this trust we will train today."

No-one in the truck spoke a word, but it was obvious that none of them liked the idea of trusting the other that much – they had known each other for a week now, a few exceptions longer because they served in the army together before.

Their journey continued for a while, but about twenty minutes later they had finally arrived back at the camp, where they were immediately directed towards the pool, where the combat divers were already waiting. They all lined about on one side of the pool, still shivering from the cold, and waited for the instructor to arrive and explain their next training. After a few minutes he finally entered the site. He stopped and took a look at the group.

"What are you waiting for, enter the pool already."

A few nervous glances were exchanged, most of them had seen enough water for today already, and they were still in their full uniform, but it was only a single moment of hesitation before they all entered the water, which, to everyone's surprise, was even colder than the water in the river from before. The cold immediately started entering their bodies and their nerves scream from pain, it almost felt like they had been lit on fire. The instructor nodded towards one of the frogmen and then turned back to his group.

"This will be your last training for today: swim until you no longer can."

The eyes of most of the soldiers widened, the rest looked rather confused.

"What... what d-d-do you m... mmmean by no longer c-can?" one of the soldiers asked, his teeth already chattering.

The instructor sighed as if he had been asked a really stupid question by a small child.

"I mean it like I said it, and I said until you no longer can. That's why we're training with the combat divers together today: You'll swim until you all black out, and you will have to trust those around you that they are capable of doing their job to pull you out."

With this he turned around, missing the shocked looks on the faces of all soldiers in the pool, including the combat divers.

"I'll be back in an hour to check the progress."

**/ Khin'Zaru vas Omony's point of view (exploration-vessel of the Quarians, several days after broadcast of the first-contact-package) /**

The Quarian could feel the air around his suit dropping several degrees in temperature at the stare the Admiral was throwing towards him through the screen. He had just finished his daily report (which he had to give every few hours on request of the Admiral) and explained that he had still not received any answer from the planets surface that was clearly directed towards his ship. He had wanted to explain that the content of the package was simply too advanced for a race that hadn't achieved FTL travel yet, their computer-systems would most likely not be far developed enough to decrypt the messages, but one look at Rael'Zorah was enough to ensure that he wouldn't question his superior if he had any interest in return to the fleet within his lifetime.

"Answer me marine" Rael'Zorah whispered, the anger in his voice clearly audible, "did they not receive the message, or do they simply ignore us?".

Khin thought about how to explain it without endangering himself before he answered.

"Neither nor sir, my crew has noted increased air-traffic on every part of the planet that is reachable from our current position since we sent the package, it looks like they are preparing for an invasion. Most likely they weren't able to translate the contents of the package yet, or they are a species that is extremely paranoid and thinks that everything told in the package could be a lie. Or maybe the first ship accidentally killed some of their people and they misunderstood it as an intentional act of aggression."

The Admiral didn't answer, it didn't even look like he had heard a single word from what Khin had just said, his exhaustion clearly visible. It was obvious that admiral Zorah hadn't been sleeping for days.

"How low..."

Khin'Zaru jumped at the sudden movement of the Admiral, who had jerked his head like he had just remembered something very important.

"How low can you fly within their atmosphere without them shooting at you?"

"I... I don't know, we don't know what kind of weapon they are using, or how high their air-vehicles can fly. What are you planning sir?"

"If it's like you said and they don't have the hardware necessary to decrypt the messages, then we will simply have to bring the hardware to them. I want you to prepare a package, and this time a real package, not a data one, that includes rations, medicine and an omnitool with the instruction-video running on loop, and with the data-package installed. Make sure this whole thing is isolated and then drop it near the crash-site of my daughters ship."

"But sir, what if they think it's a bomb? They will attack us, or worse, will think that our race is hostile, in which case your daughter – if she is still alive – won't be secure anymore!"

"Then drop it somewhere where you can't accidentally hurt any of their people, maybe over a lake or sea. Yeah, a body of water should do it, it'll also keep the equipment from breaking – just make sure that you don't mess up on the isolation."

"But sir, that's..."

"I don't want to hear any excuses, and don't take me for some delusional idiot – I'm perfectly aware of how dangerous this could be, but it's not like we have many alternatives. If we wait for too long my daughter and her crew will die either from dehydration, infections or starvation, if they aren't killed by some of their scientists first in an experiment. But that's not all, if it's like you said then they still don't know that we have no intention of fighting a war with them. I'd rather meet a species that knows that they won't have to fight us than a species that lived for months in fear of being wiped out by our people."

* * *

_Author's notes:_

_Yay, finally the Kampfschwimmer-chapter (Kampfschwimmer = combat divers / frogmen), it's one of those story-points I had planned in advance. This whole "swim till you almost drown"-thingy was inspired by a story a friend of mine told me, who actually applied to become part of the German Combat Divers, and it's actually a thing: You have to swim until you black out, but it's not so much a trust-building training (even though you have to trust the medics enough to rescue you of course) but more of an "in a real war you also can't take a break because you 'can't go on anymore', you have to keep on going until you reach land, or you drown" exercise. I have also heard similar stuff from some infantry-companies (again, friend of mine – I have surprisingly many friends in different parts of the army, not sure why) where they have to keep on running until they collapse. One more reason why I would never apply to the army, but hey, whatever floats your boat._

_I also decided to listen to someone who wrote a review, in which he stated that I should keep up the "giving names to unimportant people"-thing of mine, but maybe think about making them minor characters when possible. It's a good idea, so I decided to use them from time to time (e.g. Khin'Zaru and Adrian Zeissner were disposable characters, but I think I will keep them around for a while longer)._

_Hope you enjoyed the chapter,_

_~Yaesephir_


	10. Expectations

**Chapter 10: Expectations**

_A few days ago I decided to send my story to various communities, so that people interested in AU-stories and stuff like that had an easier time finding it – suddenly the view-count of my story exploded! It's really unbelievable, this story isn't even three weeks old and we have already passed 30k words and 10k views. A huge 'thank you' to everyone from me because of this._

_I don't have much to say today other than the fact that I haven't prepared an april fools joke, since I'm not the biggest fan of those._

* * *

**/ Unknown person | unknown location /**

"I hope they will show those alien bastards what the government wasted our tax-dollars the last fifty years on: weapons, weapons and even more weapons. If they think that it'll be easy to take away our homes then they'll get to know what we are made of! And you fucking liberals wanted to take away our guns all those years, and now see who comes crawling back."

"You don't get it, do you, this is exactly the reason why people like you shouldn't get guns in the first place: when you finally have them in your hands you are so eager to use them that you will start a war with someone before even considering what they could possibly want from us. I mean they are aliens! Our money is worthless to them, the resources most valuable to us are still useless rocks that look a bit shinier than others and some rotten dead ancient creatures we use to accelerate our vehicles, vehicles which use technology which would only have any value to them if they plan on building a museum. They most likely only want to trade with us."

"You are a moron, you said it yourself: we have nothing of value we could offer them, and they won't give their stuff away for free. They will simply enslave us and use us as cheap workforces. You are too damn trusting."

"And you are too paranoid and idiotic – they will surely have robots to do their work, which is a lot cheaper, robots don't need food, don't need to be trained, do not rebel."

The two arguing people didn't notice the man who had stopped a few meters away and listened to their argument, lowering the tablet in his hand for a few moments. The neutral look on his face was replaced by a sad one for a few instants, before going back to the emotionless look he usually had. He slowly started walking again and returned his attention to the tablet in his hand and the stock exchange it was showing.

**/ Adrian Zeissner's point of view | 9 days after the crash /**

A shudder ran down Zeissner's spine when his colleague came rushing into his office and started shouting.

"You, it's all your fault!"

The professor knew that him leaking the files would be found out sooner or later, but he hadn't expected it to happen so soon. With all what was happening at the moment he had thought that most people would most likely be busy with other things than their own employees.

"We made a breakthrough in the decryption-progress! It was all because of your comment on their number of fingers, you were right!"

Professor Zeissner stopped dead in his tracks when his thought-process slowly took an 180 degree turn to understand the new information.

"Wait, when you said 'my fault' you meant that?"

"Yeah, wanted to scare you for a bit, we didn't have much to laugh about in the past days, but your face just now totally made up for it. What did you think I was talking about? Were you the one who scratched the BMW of our boss?"

"No, you know I didn't leave the facility for quite a while. I thought something along the lines of 'you made some mistake in your calculations and something happened to the patients'" Zeissner quickly made up.

"Way to undermine your own reputation – anyway you were right, they don't use bits. The whole time we were looking for 'on' and 'off' information in the signal, but that only gave us junk-data. When you said the thing with them having only six fingers, or better three fingers per hand I rerun the tests, and guess what I found: The whole time we were only focusing on what for them is negative and positive signals, but they have a third one: the neutral one. Now that we know that these parts exist within the signal suddenly all the junk-data makes sense, we simply only received 66% of the message! After some reruns and adjusting to our software we can now identify periodical signals and patterns within the data-package a lot easier, my co-worker said that he might even have identified some image-chunks already. Now it's only a lot more trial and error to find out how exactly their data-formats are structured, but this won't take too long, since that can be automated and we have more than enough processing power available."

The professor couldn't think of a different answer than dropping his jaw. Yesterday they had absolutely nothing and now they were on the verge of already identifying the structures of their computer-systems? That was amazing! Additional to that it looked like his colleague didn't even have a clue that data had been leaked.

Now that he thought about it his whole adventure of copying all the files and uploading them had been a huge waste of time that would only have negative consequences for him, as they had apparently cracked the message themselves.

Suddenly the sirens in the facility started in deafening loudness, and the lights dimmed down, revealing the emergency-lights in the floor that lead to the next exit. Adrian and his co-worker glanced at each other, but before any of them could ask what was happening the speakers started shouting a message:

"The alien ship has entered the atmosphere and dropped a package, impact in less than three minutes, we do not know if it's a bomb or something else yet, all personal is asked to immediately seek shelter in the lower floors."

Both of them immediately dropped everything they had been holding and ran out of the room, towards the elevator. They had been trained for situations like this before, since the military didn't know what sort of explosives the aliens would be using they had simply calculated all scenarios on the worst-case-outcome: a nuclear device or a bomb with similar (or even higher) potential.

"Three minutes? Why don't they shoot the fucking package, what did the air force buy all their jets if they don't use them?" Zeissner's co-worker managed to ask between breaths. They had reached the elevator and waited a bit for it to arrive, stepping in the already half-filled chamber. The door immediately closed after they had entered and the elevator kept moving down, stepping almost every floor to pick up even more people.

"They probably either fear of the possible consequences, an explosion midair could destroy more than an explosion on the ground, since the EMP of a nuclear explosion would have a larger area to affect. Either that or they're taking a gamble, hoping that it's not a bomb."

**/ Timon's point of view | ESA communication-department /**

"That's what I'm telling you, this thing is glowing like a Christmas-tree, it's a box with LEDs or a different light source attached to it – if they wanted to bomb us they would do a lot better job at hiding the explosive."

"And what is if that's exactly what they want us to believe? We could simply shoot down this damn thing, but we're not doing it, because it doesn't look like it's a weapon."

"I highly doubt that an advanced race like this would need to use dirty tricks like the one you described to bomb us back into the stone-age."

"A highly advanced wouldn't need it, but a highly intelligent one would use every advantage it can get in combat."

Timon didn't know what to say – he knew that the conclusions his colleague was presenting were logical, but he had a gut feeling that this wasn't the case. The past week they have had a lot of similar discussions, the opinion on what to think about the aliens were split into two different groups, the one that thought that the aliens could and even should be trusted, since they were way more advanced, while the second group argued that they were simply too different from humans, so that relying solely on common sense would be dangerous and that a bit of paranoia towards the visitors was needed. And this was only the opinions of different scientists and engineers who all worked for a space agency, where every single one had dreamed about contact with an alien race for ages, outside the agency the situation looked a bit different:

Most political parties, religions and philosophies had split into separate groups almost immediately after the announcement of extraterrestrial sentient life become public. Where in most countries the government had slowly decayed to a mediocre mix of compromises over the years, now suddenly the parties started showing their fundamentally different believes openly again, radicalizing over night, the number of people who left the church because they saw this new development as proof of absence of a god in the universe skyrocketed in almost the same degree as amount of people who now joined the church increased, since many feared an upcoming war and searched for something in their lives to depend on in this increasingly fast changing times. To everyone's surprise it was the religions who radicalized the least, since all major religions had turned away from preaching about god as an invisible all-mighty being towards preaching about love and empathy quite a while ago, and since the existence of other sentient beings had little impact on these abstract concepts, they didn't take a clear side on what to think about the new arrivals. Timon's train of thought was interrupted when his co-worker continued with his argument:

"And also, if it was only a package why don't they just drop it off at the ISS or something."

"That's... actually a good question. Maybe they don't know that we have spacesuits which allow our astronauts to leave the station, and since we the station is not big enough for them to land inside and they don't know the human standards needed to safely dock on the station, they don't bother. Or maybe there is something inside that package that needs special equipment to be used, equipment a space-station doesn't have."

"Yeah, whatever. We'll find out in 30 seconds anyway – I'll stay with explosives."

"Betting against it."

"The usual?"

"The usual."

Both of them stared at the large screen that showed the projected path of the package and it's impact point, together with a countdown when the impact would happen. With every second that passed the tension grew higher, and both were secretly hoping that Timon was the one to win the bet. Then the countdown hit zero and the package hit the surface of the lake it had been aimed at. Everyone in the department who had watched the screen held their breath – and released it after a few seconds, cheering and celebrating this extraordinarily anticlimactic event.

**/ Joker's point of view /**

"That has got to be the most retarded idea I have heard in my entire life, and I'm pretty sure that it will stay in this top spot for years to come."

"Come on, just because it is unusual doesn't mean it won't work."

"That's not what I'm talking about, I'm sure we could get it to work somehow, but seriously, who the fuck gets the idea to put fucking water-cannons into a drone?"

All eyes were now directed towards Jeff, who acted like a child who had been caught stealing cookies from the cookie-jar.

"What?"

"You know exactly what I'm talking about – why is there a blueprint of a water-cannon for the gun-mount of the drone on the stack you gave me to work on? One day you get angry because we don't work on your drone hard enough, the other day you give us stuff like this. I seriously have a hard time understanding you."

"Hey, like I said, it's unusual, but not a joke. Imagine the following: An alien ship shoots a projectile, maybe a rocket, towards one of the drones – how do we stop it? I know that I'm good at evading conventional rockets, put we don't know with what propulsion-technique their weapons work and at what speed, so I wouldn't rely solely on my skills. We can't make the hulls of the drone thick enough to withstand an impact, since it would get too heavy, we don't have the money to build stealth-technology and we we don't have the technology to build any high-tech defense systems like a laser-gun. So we have to use something else – and at the speed of a rocket a small film of water is still hard as concrete."

"So you seriously plan to build a water-cannon into the drone?"

"Yes. No. I don't know – I just know that we will have to deal with this problem, and this was the first thing I came up with. I'm open to suggestions, but I haven't heard any from you yet."

"Okay, I think we can all agree that water will NOT be the option we will take."

All students in the room except Joker nodded in unison.

"But the idea of shooting the projectile down instead of putting armour on the drone isn't too bad. Maybe we could use metal projectiles instead."

"Possible, but a bit heavy, what about..."

And with this the students in the room started discussing various possibilities on how to make Joker's idea usable. Jeff didn't mind, he knew that all it took to get people to work together was to allow everyone to contribute something – and for that to happen he normally simply had to suggest one stupid idea with many obvious flaws, that still ad addressed the core problem, and soon everyone would gather and remove one flaw after another until only a working solution was left.

While everyone around him was talking and arguing their ideas, Joker's thoughts drifted towards Johanna. He would never openly admit it, but he missed her. Both of them had never been one of these people that needed to annoy everyone around them with their flirting (though they did it from time to time, Shepard because she had a twisted sort of humor, where she liked to put people into uncomfortable situations, and Joker because he found the faces and expressions of the people put into those situations hilarious when they found out it was all a play.). No, what he really missed was simply having her around him. He was bit introverted (though many people didn't notice it as they mistook his humor and cynical answers for his real personality), who enjoyed having people around him, as long as they didn't force him into a conversation on every opportunity, just so that they could feel better afterwards for having spent time with the cripple. Shepard was the polar opposite, talking to everyone on every opportunity, but the way she talked to Jeff was different than how she spoke to everyone else – while she lead the conversation with everyone else she never took the initiative when it came to conversations with him, instead she often simply sat down next to him and listened to his story, something she had described as 'relaxing' on several occasions.

But now that she was in the KSK he wouldn't be able to see her for quite a while, and even though he understood why she had applied, it didn't mean that he liked it. It was great that she was competent, he didn't have a thing for weak women, but it would also be a problem if she became so good in what she was doing that he wouldn't be able to see her again. He quickly shook his head – one more reason why this whole drone program had to work out, no matter the cost.

* * *

_Author's notes:_

_A guy named '**Wisekill1**' posted a review after the last chapter, asking why the Quarians didn't simply drop the package off in front of the ISS. And when I read it my first reaction really was "that's a good question. I have no idea why." Truth is, I had simply forgotten about the ISS up until this point, I even thought about rewriting the previous chapter. But then I went through the scene again and found a few problems that would arise if the Quarians decided to do so:_

_On earth we have standardized parts in space-travel, so that our rockets and shuttles can dock on the ISS without losing all the oxygen to the vacuum. The Quarians do not have these standardized parts, since all council-races (and non-council races) simply build their stations large enough that smaller ships can land inside a hangar, or can use one of their standardized docking-protocols._

_They still haven't given up that the crew of the crashed vessel might still be alive, so they want to bring medicine and food down to them as fast as possible._

_Because of this I decided to leave the previous chapter alone and instead include this question (which still makes sense form humanities perspective) in this chapter, as seen in the discussion between Timon and his co-worker. So thanks to Wisekill1 for giving me this idea, reviews like that are always welcome._

_Let's hope that I can keep up the pace and don't have to go even slower when university starts again Q_Q_

_~Yaesephir_


	11. Little Steps

**Chapter 11: Little steps**

_Hi, Yaesephir here._

_You might wonder what happened that I didn't update this story for so long, and might have even forgot about it (it almost looked like I had abandoned it, didn't it?)._

_The answer is simple: I fucked up._

_I had half this chapter already written for a really long time, but a part of it didn't really fit with the rest of the story I had planned out, so I started thinking about how to maybe add changes to keep this idea possible, started going back and forth and ultimately pushed myself into a corner._

_And when it didn't work out like I wanted to I got a writers block._

_So a few days ago I opened the story again and decided to delete large parts of the last chapter, even if it pained me. Now some of the cool ideas I wanted in this chapter are gone, but I can hopefully continue writing again._

_So to tl;dr it: I'm sorry._

_(nice side-effect though: Because I had to re-read my own story to ensure I didn't forget anything I fixed a whole lot of typos and grammar mistakes. I promise, no more 'college' instead of 'colleague' from now on ;D)_

* * *

**/ Shepard's point of view /**

Shepard bit her lower lip and tried moving forward, but every single part of her body was hurting. In the training the day before she had struggled to stay afloat for several hours, a lot longer than all of the other soldiers, and had refused to give up control over her body for the longest time. When she had finally passed out the medics had immediately pulled her out of he pool and started to transport her into a heated environment to warm her up again, as her body's core-temperature had dropped dangerously low. From the hours of swimming with full equipment she had extreme muscle soreness, and she had gotten the rest of that day off to recover herself a bit, but the next day she already had to return to training with the rest of the group. Her superior had switched around her training a bit, since he had never seen anyone stay conscious that long in the cold water, and had assigned her to the shooting range for the whole day, as it would put the least amount of stress on her muscles.

They had also recently announced that they were currently in the progress of partnering with several special forces around the world to better coordinate their efforts in training soldiers for "combat in areas beyond reach of current generations of foot-soldiers", aka space-combat. The already harsh training increased even more when this partnership was announced, now they were forced to regularly take exercises in low-pressure chambers, rotating rooms (to simulate changes in gravity), tactics for combat in zero-g environments (they still didn't have an idea on how to prepare soldiers for this, since zero gravity on earth could only be achieved in so called 'reduced gravity aircrafts', which allowed zero gravity for an average of 22 seconds by going into freefall, or by training underwater, which didn't realistically portray the movement in gas filled spacecrafts, so they limited themselves to theory, e.g. how to shoot a gun so that you only got flung backwards and you didn't start rotating, how to rotate in certain directions if needed, and so on), hand-to-hand combat without the use of leverage, but their training wasn't only limited to combat: The also received classes on ethics and how to possibly deescalate situations in scenarios where the aggressor was unfamiliar with human language, mimics and gestures.

Some of the soldiers had to completely relearn some stuff they had learned before: before collateral damage was an unfortunate thing, but sometimes couldn't be avoided, but now the priorities had shifted: every action a member of these forces took could have a huge impact on the way these aliens would perceive humanity as a whole. Over the course of many different courses they learned that many of their missions wouldn't be completely secret anymore – before the governments had the means to redact information about them from the public, but now there were also other races who would most likely have media of their own, over which they didn't have any control. Because of this the idea behind various special forces around the world shifted from "the mission comes first" to "the well-being of humanity comes first".

This realization wasn't exclusive to the special forces, many different agencies had to go through a refitting, new agencies were formed, all focusing on one fact: they no longer had the advantage of superior technology, so what could be done to get out of this disadvantage? New guidelines were suggested which would suggest suicide over imprisonment, budgets increased to kickstart technological advancement in every field imaginable, and many things more.

Shepard didn't notice much of this, most of her days were filled from morning to evening with training, so whenever she actually got downtime she was too tired to read the news. So when Johanna returned from the shooting-range that evening she did what she normally did when she had enough time to relax in front of the computer: she called Joker.

"Hey Jeff."

"Hey Jo- what the fuck did they do to you, you look terrible! Did they ran over you with a tank? Or maybe not a tank multiple ones? Or even worse, did they force you to eat in their cafeteria?"

"They didn't do anything, I just didn't put on any makeup."

"Haha, really funny Joy. But really, how was your day, babe? I can't imagine that whatever sort of training they put you through is healthy if the outcome makes you look like this."

"Yeah... actually today was rather relaxed, yesterday was what made me look like this, but I don't really want to talk abouuuw. OUCH."

"What?"

"Oww I bit my tongue. Sorry, I'm exhausted enough that I can't even talk normally, can't you just talk and tell me about your day instead?"

"Yeeeeeeaaaaaahhh, about that... I think you just get turned on by my voice and you're too tired for foreplay, amiright?"

"If that's what you want to believe, I'm too tired to make a witty comeback right now."

Shepard yawned and laid down on her bed, the laptop next to her head.

"You're no fun tired like that, you know that?" Joker snarked.

"mmmh."

"Okay, my day then. Well not much happened, we managed to make the circuit-boards for our drone a bit smaller and made some test-flights with our prototype. Greg started modding one of those VR-goggles to live-stream the video-feed from the cameras to it and..."

The rest of his explanation Shepard never heard, she already was fast asleep.

**/ Joker's point of view /**

Jeff smiled at the face of his sleeping girlfriend. He continued to talk about his day, slowly lowering his voice in the progress, until it was no longer audible, then he put his PC into standby-mode, so that Skype would keep running and not wake her up with a loud "voicechat ended"-sound.

He had wanted to complain how hard his day had been, but after seeing Johanna like this, covered in bruises and dead tired he instantly felt like a hypocrite for even thinking that his day had been tiring. It shouldn't surprise him, it was no secret that the special forces would have a bit larger workload to deal with than some random student, still, the change had come so fast that he still felt like only slowly catching up with the recent turn of events.

His day had been tiring though. After they had dismantled his suggestion of a watercannon they had quickly come up with a better plan: They decided to attach most of the non-critical components of the drone in a way which allowed them to simply drop them mid-flight, and even accelerate them in certain directions. This way they would be able to 'shoot' an incoming missile by sacrificing components of the drone, which were way cheaper to replace than a whole drone. As a nice side-effect the drone didn't get any heavier, and after modifying the system even a bit further it'd even be (theoretically) possible to re-attach disconnected parts mid-flight. But that wasn't everything they had accomplished today: For a few days now they had been searching for ways to further reduce the cost of the drone without reducing functionality. They had called various companies if they would be willing to part from hardware they were no longer using or if they'd receive discounts for ordering larger quantities (on top of ordering them for a good cause), and even though no company they had reached had been willing to waste resources, one of the companies they had called informed them that they had received a similar call only a few hours ago, and given them to contact details of the other caller.

It turned out to be a small group of people from Poland, who had started working on an independent tracking-system, which worked by measuring distances between every single device in the network, becoming more and more accurate the more devices were using the system. Since the satellites around earth were most likely to be the first things targeted in case of an invasion, GPS was not a reliable source for measuring distances in the near future. So after contacting this group it quickly became clear that both parties would profit from integrating this system in the drones: They drones would be able to navigate as long as any other drones were still online, and the tracking system called 'Pajęczyna' would receive a huge boost in numbers, which would ensure the stability of the service.

As fortunate they were to stumble across this opportunity, as unfortunate they were with the fact that they now somehow had to organize a way to work together with this company in a different country, which put even more stress on their finances.

Jeff started rubbing his right temple, where a headache had started to form. He decided to call it a day and continue tomorrow, no point in breaking your head over it today. Hopefully he could convince them to also call the project 'Pajec' instead of the correct polish pronunciation, he couldn't imagine ever correctly learning that word.

**/ Kasumi Goto's point of view, Japan /**

Kasumi's heart was beating so loud, she almost feared the man in front of her would hear it any turn around any second now. Step by step she came nearer to her target, trying her hardest not to inhale or exhale to loudly or unnaturally. She took a last look to see if she could spot her friend, then she quickly took two steps in quick succession and stumbled into the man. They both fell to to the ground, the man dropping his suitcase in the progress, which promptly came open, spilling paperwork everywhere.

"Ouch. Oh my god, I'm so sorry, are you alright?" Kasumi immediately apologized, slipping her cellphone into the suitcase while nobody was looking.

"Here, let me help you up."

She offered her hand to the man lying on the floor and pulled him up. She then started collecting the paperwork flying around and putting it back into the suitcase, covering her phone and apologizing to the man a few more times in the progress. Luckily he wasn't angry, so after exchanging a few more apologizes for not locking his suitcase properly and her not paying attention they parted ways.

It didn't take long after he was out of sight that Kasumi spotted her friend sitting in a café nearby. She dusted off her clothes and moved over to him, sitting down in the seat opposite of him.

Keiji Okuda didn't look up from his laptop, only after she ordered a coffee for herself herself he closed it.

"And?" he asked, taking a sip of the already cold coffee that was standing in front of him.

"It worked, I slipped in my phone unnoticed."

"I already know that, I have just finished copying the data of the RFID-chip. I meant if you are alright. You are red like a tomato."

Only now Kasumi noticed that her heart was still beating extremely fast, only slowly starting to calm down.

"I... he was so near. I thought he'd notice for sure."

Keiji nodded and took another sip of his coffee, apparently indifferent to the cool beverage. He finished his rather large sip without breaking eye-contact to her. Then he put down his cup on the table and spoke up again.

"You liked it."

It wasn't a question, he stated it in the same way he had stated that her face was flushed red, simply as if to state a fact, not as if he wanted to point out something negative.

Kasumi wanted to shake her head, but after opening her mouth to say something she decided against it. He was right – she hadn't felt that alive for a long time, the thrill of not getting caught doing something sneaky still fresh pumping through her veins. So she closed her mouth again without saying anything and gave him a single nod. The nod was small, but she was sure had seen it.

The "excuse me" of the waitress interrupted him before he could say something. After he had ordered another coffee he turned back to the girl.

Kasumi's face slowly started to regain a normal colour. She was glad that she didn't flush over embarrassing things, because she started to regret nodding over his statement. It was pretty weird if she thought about it. Keiji fortunately didn't seem to think so.

"You wanna do it again?" was his next question.

Another nod.

"Who is the next target?" she asked.

"For now: no one. Won't take me too long to find something similar though."

She cocked an eyebrow.

"What is the use of doing it without gaining anything from it?"

He shrugged.

"Nothing. You looked like you had fun doing it, should be enough of a reason if you ask me."

After thinking for a few seconds he added

"You could see it as some sort of unconventional date if you want. Or if you don't mind."

She looked at him for a while. Then she nodded, this time smiling.

"I'd love to."

**/ Tali'Zorah's point of view /**

Tali's stomach hurt. It had been days since they ran out of emergency-rations. A few days ago the hyumen watching over them had given them some sort of fluid to drink, which apparently allowed him to take far clearer pictures of their insides when scanning them, and after scanning all of them he had convinced them to allow an operation. Maybe convinced was the wrong word, after eating nothing for so long he had only explained that he might have an idea to stop them from starving, and most of the crew had immediately volunteered for the operation. Hunger was a scary thing.

He had put each of them into separate sterile rooms and asked them to remove their suits. At first Tali had been hesitated to do so (and if she had to guess, probably also the rest of her crew), since it felt wrong to show oneself to someone you didn't know without the so familiar suit surrounding you. But in the end she wasn't willing to give up her life over something as stupid as not following orders in an examination.

She knew that their only way to survive this whole mess was by hoping that these hyumen knew what they were doing, since no one knew that she and her crew were stranded, and they themselves had no way to get new supplies without a working spacecraft.

After she had undressed the scientists (apparently the hyumen who had made the scans wasn't responsible for the operation after all) had taken measurements and pictures, which made her even more embarrassed. After they had finished all of these procedures it was time for the operation. The scientists had cut her belly and inserted a small tube directly after her stomach into the digestive track. It had been an extremely unpleasant experience, since the only thing keeping her from feeling the pain were different cooling pastes applied to her skin, since the hyumen didn't know which sedative would work with the Quarian race, and it looked like they weren't willing to take chances.

After the operation was over she had felt tired, exhausted and relieved at the same time. She didn't know how the hyumen had done it, but they had managed to not damage any major blood vessels, so she had lost almost no blood during the operation, which would've been fatal, as she had neither access to any blood donations nor could she regenerate the blood without any nutrition.

The second wave of relief was when she started to feel better in the following days.

Not only had the room been clean enough to not cause any infections, but she also noticed that the external digestive system (she had figured that this was what the tube was for) seemed to work good enough to keep her and her crew alive.

She hadn't seen her crew since the operation, because they couldn't wear their suits with the tube still sticking out of them, but the scientists had assured her that all of them had survived and most of them were healthy. Only one of the servicemen had apparently lost quite a lot of blood and felt dizzy since then, but they had managed to close the vein, and with their alternative digestive system now providing with energy he'd be able to recover.

That didn't change the fact that they all felt hungry though.

Their last meal in form of nutrition paste had been days ago, and since then their real stomach had been empty. Thinking was hard over the pain that emitted from it. It was no use that their brain knew that they wouldn't starve if the body still felt hungry.

Tali pressed her hands on her belly, cautious not to tug on the tube. The scientists had been nice enough to give her some of their medical clothing, which covered way less than her suit, but it was still better than nothing.

She wondered what had happened to the paid who had originally helped them out. After the soldiers had separated them she hadn't heard anything from them, and she feared the worst. It was another reason her stomach hurt: Not only had these people helped them without wanting anything in return, but they had also looked so... familiar. Sure, it was a newly discovered species, but anyone who'd ever seen an Asari would immediately notice the similarities: The same amount of fingers, the limbs, the similarity of the face (fur instead of scalp crests, red-ish instead of blue skin-colour); Even the mimic and the vocal range of their voice was similar, it was almost uncanny.

**/ Rael'Zorah's point of view – Migrant Fleet /**

"THESE FUCKING BASTARDS! I'LL RIP THEIR FUCKING MANDIBLES OFF AND STAB OUT THEIR EYES WITH THEM!"

The Admiralty Board was fuming from anger, Rael'Zorah even more so since the last days had left him yearning for good news. And good news he had received this morning – apparently the exploration vessel had manged to pinpoint the position of the crashed spacecraft far enough even with the amount of radio noise sent from the surface, and the species on the planet had allowed the package to be dropped without deploying any counter-measures. He had thought that this message would be enough to keep him from losing his mind in the following days, but only two hours later the admiralty board had been called for an emergency conclave meeting and other news, bad ones this time, had managed to completely ruin his and everyone's day.

"Admiral Zorah, we are all shocked by this development, but we would ask you to stay professional, nothing good comes from taking actions in anger."

Rael'Zorah took a look at the screen which showed all the captains of the different ships that made up the migrant fleet, and he could see that even though the speaker tried to calm him down, it didn't look like he had a completely different opinion about the whole situation.

The virus caused blackout a few days ago had been suspicious the whole time, but only now they found out what the attackers had tried to achieve:

The meteor belt which the flotilla had chosen as their next stop to stock up on raw metals for reparation purposes had revealed surprisingly large amounts of element zero, enough to fuel the whole flotilla for several weeks. As meteors weren't restricted by the same laws as planetary surfaces the Quarian people would've been allowed to mine this source – and with this would've been able to invest the credits not spent on fuel on reparations or a few new ships instead.

But then the blackout had prevented the flotilla from safely accelerating for two whole days since almost all systems had to be checked for suspicious sub-routines that weren't there before. And in these two days a mining company funded by the Turian government had claimed the meteor belt and set up their mining equipment instead.

It was too convenient to not be planned.

Of course the Turian hierarchy had denied all knowledge of such an attack and feigned ignorance.

The Quarians knew better, but they couldn't do anything about it.

What frustrated Rael the most was the fact that this emergency meeting was about what meteor field to visit instead, and not about what to do against this injustice. They knew that they wouldn't be able to do anything against it, not if they didn't want to waste even more resources in a legal fight which would never end in their favour.

At times like this he even wondered why they even stayed in citadel space. They clearly weren't wanted, their people were oppressed and treated like thieves, no matter where they went. And those were the lucky ones. The unlucky ones were enslaved by batarian slavers, a race of people who didn't contribute to the galactic society with anything at all, brought fear and destruction to those living near them, and still somehow were regarded higher than the Quarians.

But of course, he knew the answer to this question himself. They didn't have the resources to leave citadel space far enough to give it any symbolic meaning. They would always stay outcasts, circling in space near their old homeworld, which now was nothing else than a dark reminder of a glorious past, long gone by, which they had lost to their own greatest mistake.

He chuckled, no real amusement in his voice.

Rannoch. He remembered how hard he tried to go back to this stupid piece of rock, how hard he had tired pushing to reconquer it, not really because he thought so highly of the homeworld himself, he had never seen it himself after all, but more because his daughter had always loved the stories about it he had read to her as a child. A stupid childish promise he wouldn't be able to fulfill anyway.

How important it had seemed when she was still around, how hard he had wished to see his daughter happy, how hard he had wanted this planet back just to fulfill his promise.

Now?

Now he only want back his daughter.

He'd trade the homeworld for his daughter if necessary.

* * *

_Author's notes:_

_I hope I can now go back to updating regularly and that I don't repeat the same mistake again._

_Like always: If you see any mistakes, if you dislike something or if you simply want to tell me that you did enjoy the story: please write a review or send a PM :)_


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